I like all of the advice in this article, except for the part about Jeweler (the emphasis is mine):
With the exception of experienced cutters, or those who want or need to have complete control over every line of code, there are gem authoring tools that can automate the majority of the manual work required, and avoid amateur mistakes, when publishing gems for the first time.
The biggest of the gem authoring tools at the moment is Jeweler (RubyGems, GitHub), which aims to provide a set of wizard based gem automation tools. It has tasks to manage releasing, versioning, dependencies, executables and Rake tasks all out of the box; it can be a real time saver in the long run for frequent or beginner gem publishers.
In my experience, Jeweler makes developing a gem more complicated and error-prone than it would be without it. I think that developing a Rubygem with Bundler is a better way to go for new libraries. Bundler has some helpful info, too.
I haven't used it, but gem-release may also be useful.
I like all of the advice in this article, except for the part about Jeweler (the emphasis is mine):
In my experience, Jeweler makes developing a gem more complicated and error-prone than it would be without it. I think that developing a Rubygem with Bundler is a better way to go for new libraries. Bundler has some helpful info, too.
I haven't used it, but
gem-releasemay also be useful.