RVM 2.0: Convert 20,000 lines of shell script into Ruby [Fundraiser]

I would love to hear more about "leverage existing package management systems".

I guess many people use rvm to install ruby and I always recommend newbies to try it out for that purpose.

But recent criticisms of ruby made me wonder if that really is the right approach. Maybe it would be better to put more effort into creating top-notch packages for the major linux distros (and, say, homebrew). And to work with the distributions on the stable packages, while offering official repositories to get the latest versions.

rvm could still play a role in this scenario as a tool to switch between versions, isolate gem installations and so on, offering a unified interface that hides the platform differences of the distros.

I would certainly donate to such a cause.

And this is exactly the problem with all those "simpler" alternatives to RVM. They all claim to be simpler and doing less "unnecessary" stuff.

And they are simpler, from a technical point of view. But unless you, the user, is very skilled at Unix and knows exactly how environment variables, shell sessions, bashrc etc works, it's going to be more confusing. RVM is more complicated because it does more, in order to make it easier for users. Notice that most of the people who like rbenv/chruby are exactly the kind of people who are already intimately familiar with the Unix environment.

I write C++ for a living and use the command line daily. Last time I used rbenv, I quickly gave up because I had to manually mess with $PATH, bashrc and other stuff that RVM always took care for me. I know how that stuff works, but the whole point of tools is to make my life easier. If I have to do so much stuff manually then why should I use rbenv? Back to RVM for me.

$100/hr x 500 hours = $50,0000

$100/hr is a very conservative estimate for an hourly rate for a senior level Ruby engineer that can read and understand shell code and implement clean, well documented code.

500 hours also seems very reasonable given that they'd be rewriting 20,000 lines of Bash. Not an easy task.

Creating proper platform-specific packages is a mad undertaking, requiring huge amounts of manpower to setup and to maintain. We provide native Phusion Passenger packages for 5 platforms (3 Ubuntu versions, 2 Debian versions, OS X Homebrew) and it's already crazy complicated. Check out the toolchain that we spent months on building:

https://github.com/phusion/passenger_apt_automation

https://github.com/phusion/passenger_autobuilder

And this is just one software package. Imagine at least 10 Ruby interpreters and versions (all versions of MRI 1.8, 1.9 and 2.0, all versions of Rubinius, all versions of JRuby). Now multiply that by the number of popular platforms. That's at least 13 (2 supported Ubuntu LTS versions, 1 latest Ubuntu non-LTS version, 2 supported Debian versions, latest 2 OS X versions, Windows, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, Gentoo). You'd end up with at least 100 different packages, and you'll have to test each one of them.

That's going to cost much more than a one-off campaign of $50000.

I suspect there is a lot of actively developed software out there that you do not use.