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Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

rubyinside.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

#5

Maybe this is a stupid question but do people switch between vm's a lot?

Anybody that writes Gem's will cry when they can test multiple versions without useing multiple computers or VMWare. Imagine if you could only test your work with one version of Ruby how many bugs you'd miss/hit.

Re: Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

#7
post #2

This looks like a pretty useful project. If you're using a Debian-based Linux distro, you also already have "alternatives," which is a pretty powerful framework for doing almost this exact thing.

Except that Debian's packaging policy shits all over how people actually use and distribute libraries in languages that have native packaging systems -- in my experience both Ruby and Haskell are totally fucked, and Python is done pretty decently considering.

The glacial release cycles and pointless package freezing don't help, nor does their anal-retentive insistence on rearranging everything to fit just-so into their standard filesystem layout. It infuriates them that gems are intended to be self-contained and allow multiple versions to be installed with no symlink assery.

Re: Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

#8
I've been sitting in #rvm all night helping the author with bugs and stuff. There are a few snafus here and there but nothing fatal. Things like making it work with TextMate properly, packages needed on Ubuntu when you install certan versions with RVM, etc. I'm putting any fixes I come across as comments on the Ruby Inside post :)

Basically, it's worth persevering with. Or at least going on #rvm on irc.freenode.net and bugging the creator about ;-)

Re: Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

#9
post #7
post #2

This looks like a pretty useful project. If you're using a Debian-based Linux distro, you also already have "alternatives," which is a pretty powerful framework for doing almost this exact thing.

Except that Debian's packaging policy shits all over how people actually use and distribute libraries in languages that have native packaging systems -- in my experience both Ruby and Haskell are totally fucked, and Python is done pretty decently considering. The glacial release cycles and pointless package freezing don't help, nor does their anal-retentive insistence on rearranging everything to fit just-so into the…

As far as glacial release cycles are concerned, use Ubuntu, not Debian. Problem solved.

And about packages getting rearranged, yeah, I like FreeBSD's ports better too, but you really should be using apt-get only to install rubygems and then use gem rather than apt to install the gems.

Re: Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

#10

Maybe this is a stupid question but do people switch between vm's a lot?

For now, yeah, because 1.9 is still fairly new and not 100% compatible with older Ruby code. I imagine in a year or so everyone will be on 1.9 and this sort of thing will not be need by most people for a while.
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