Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
— H.L. Mencken
The past two releases of the rspec_on_rails plugin in tarball form have been corrupt, affecting 1.0.5 and 1.0.8. Unzipping using the OS X unzipper gives you the error message “Folder does not exist,” and using tar vxzf yields the following error:
[trimmed]
rspec_on_rails-1.0.8/tasks/
rspec_on_rails-1.0.8/tasks/rspec.rake
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
RSpec on Rails requires the same revision as the RSpec plugin, so not having a working released version of the plugin pretty much makes the whole thing useless to Rails developers.
A reasonable workaround until the next release occurs is to navigate to your vendor/plugin directory and run the following command (for RSpec-1.0.8):
$ svn export --revision 2338 http://rspec.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/rspec_on_rails