In a Ruby on Rails installation, what is causing webrick to be outdated and why `gem i webrick` can update it?

Question

I have a new Mac computer and installed rails on it, and then I tried out the command

gem outdated

for some reason, it showed one of the gems outdated:

webrick (1.4.2 < 1.6.0)

I wonder why it is outdated on the first installed, and when I did

sudo gem install webrick

it actually installed 1.6.0 onto the system. Doesn't it require gem update instead of install to update something? How come install also updated it?

Answer 1

Not exactly, gem install GEM_NAME will install the last version available if you don't specify a version when installing, and you can have more than 1 version of the same gem on your machine.

you can run gem environment , and check where gems are installed, go to that folder and you will see both version gems folder there.

so when you create a rails project for example and add a specific version of a gem in the gemfile and another version on another project, you can have both without problems