Push gem documentation update without changing gem version?

Question

I recently pushed a version of one of my gems to the default rubygems.org. The gem is working as expected, but I found that there were some errors in the documentation. Is it possible to push updates to the documentation without changing the gem version? I know that it is possible to do a yank to remove the current version and replace it by another version, but it seems rather unnecessary for a simple documentation update.

For me I mainly want to change the readme, but for others it could just as well have been the TomDoc (or similar) within the code.

Any ideas on how to do this?

Recap: Change only README.md and/or TomDoc without changing the version of the gem.

Answer 1

You can't repush the same version number with changes. The RubyGems FAQ explains:

Why can't I repush a gem version? This causes several problems to start happening:

• Mirrors that comb the site (with gem mirror) would be out of sync.
• Clients can't verify the contents of gems (via MD5 or something similar) so they could download different versions, expecting the same code.
• You're not going to run out of gem versions, just push a new one.

It's that last part that's most relevant here. You're not going to run out of gem versions, so update the documentation and bump the patch version or roll the documentation updates in with the next set of patch level changes.