A corundum is a synthetic gemstone - including synthetic rubies. Ergo: a tool for synthesizing gems. Corundum starts with the outlook that gemspecs are relatively easy to work with, and that the opinion of the RubyGems team is that they should be treated as a configuration file, not a code file. Furthermore, Rake is a powerful, easy to use tool, and does admit the use of Ruby code to get the job done. The hard part about publishing gems is getting them into a state you'll be proud of. There's dozens of fiddly steps to putting together a gem fit for public consumption, and it's very easy to get some of them wrong. Corundum is a collection of Rake tasklibs, therefore, that will perform the entire process of releasing gems, including QA steps up front through packaging and releasing the gem