I think we might be losing sight of the goal, here.

RightLink is an open-source gem that is semantically versioned. It uses certain other open-source gems published by RightScale that are also semantically versioned -- right_git and right_scraper, for instance.

RightLink has dependencies on non-RightScale gems such as chef and eventmachine. In order to work well, RightLink needs our custom builds of those gems -- but our custom builds of gems are not necessary to install RightLink, and in fact RightLink may run well with "vanilla" eventmachine. We do not support this commercially -- in fact we don't even support RightLink as a standalone gem commercially -- but part of being an open-source project is enabling people to experiment and tinker if it suits them.

Publishing our own open-source gems to our private S3 bucket does not lessen the maintenance burden. Regardless where I publish my gem, producing a new build should ALWAYS involve doing the requisite testing, updating the release notes if applicable, creating a vX.Y.Z release tag, building the .gem file, and publishing it to our gem repository. The last step doesn't make the preceding steps any easier.

Publishing to RubyGems.org is actually incrementally _easier_ than publishing to our private S3 bucket. So, why do we use a private bucket? There are only two valid use cases for the private bucket:
  -- closed-source gems that we built and don't want to distribute to the world. (RightLink contains none of these.)
  -- our forks of other peoples' open-source gems that we CAN'T distribute to the world.

To put it in another light: we committed to publishing RightLink to RubyGems.org beginning with v5.9, and we have done so. However, RightLink cannot actually be *installed* from RubyGems without tampering with your gemrc, because RightLink depends on gems that are only published to our private bucket. It's embarrassing having to guide customers through a bunch of gemrc hackery merely to let them install RightLink to play with.

IMHO, if we have open-source gems that we built, then we should document, version and maintain them cluefully, and we should publish them to RubyGems.org. It helps RightLink adoption, encourages people to experiment with RightLink, and enhances our presence and visibility in the open-source world.

Publishing to a private location is the "booby prize" that we use to get our jobs done when we needed to fork a gem, or when a gem contains proprietary code.