Trouble with gem update on Mac OS X

This morning I found that my laptop had an older version of gems on it
(0.8.11).

  1. I ran “gem update --system” and got errors (because I wasn’t running
    it as root–oops).

  2. I then ran “sudo gem update --system” and it worked. (Yay! 0.9.0)

  3. I then ran “gem list a” and saw a nice list of all my local gems.
    (Yay!)

  4. I then ran “sudo gem update attributes” and got an error message.
    (I’m sorry, I didn’t copy the text down.)

  5. I then ran “sudo gem uninstall attributes” and got a message that it
    had successfully uninstalled attributes 3.2.0.

  6. I then ran “sudo gem install attributes” and got an error message.
    (Again, I didn’t copy it down. However, it was the same error message I
    got previously when my gem cache was corrupted.)

I didn’t have time to hunt down the cache and clean it out and see if
that would fix it. However, I thought I would report that either (1) or
(2) above seems to have corrupted something about my rubygems
install/cache.

This is on Mac OS X 10.4.8, with my own (well-functioning)
/usr/local/bin build of ruby 1.8.5