On Aug 11, 2011, at 5:44 PM, David Masover wrote:
> Probably the least disruptive fix would be to change the gem building process, 
> rather than the gem format. Tar is a perfectly fine format for storing file 
> permissions, it's just that we shouldn't be getting them originally from the 
> filesystem. It'd also be nice to have commandline options to override the 
> tarball's permissions with what we can guess, in a similar way.

lolcat had this problem too due to the packager's umask (I think).  RubyGems should at least warn if files are readable/writable only by root.

Remember!  When you think it's a bug, file a bug in the ticket tracker.  Here's the URL for RubyGems: