So, I had the unfortunate mispleasure of having to quickly solve The Mystery of the Hosed Rubygems Installation after installing 1 gem.
Apparently, the problem was with that gem's .gemspec file, in which the following line:
s.require_paths = %q{"lib"}
was the culprit. That one little caused the entire rubygems system to fail -- require failed, the `gem` command failed; basically everything related to Rubygems failed in one spectacular burst of flame.
The solution of course was to change it to
s.require_paths = ["lib"]
The problem being, Rubygems expects Gem::Specification#require_paths to always be an array, and, not bothering to check otherwise, tries to call Array#join. Apparently exceptions raised when parsing a gem's specification aren't caught anywhere in the system, so it hoses the whole thing top to bottom.
