[ruby-core:38907] Re: Why Ruby has versioned paths?

I think before RVM became so popular it was rather common not to use different prefixes, but to simply append a suffix (like ruby18 and ruby19) to all the executables. There is a simple configure switch for that and this was also the structure used by the Debian Ruby packages iirc. Also, you do not have to change any env vars just to switch the Ruby version.

Konstantin

On Aug 10, 2011, at 21:13 , V咜 Ondruch wrote:

> Dne 10.8.2011 14:40, Michael Klishin napsal(a):
>> 2011/8/10 V咜 Ondruch <[e-mail]>
>> And what is the reason in real life to have two versions of Ruby on your computer, since the first think which will conflict is the Ruby executable, the second are manual pages, etc ...
>> 
>> To work on different applications, both old (and thus using 1.8.7) and new (typically started on 1.9.2 these days). To make sure your libraries work on multiple Ruby versions. To provide multiple Ruby versions in case of hoster/cloud providers. To let people run CI against multiple Ruby versions like travis-ci.org.
>> 
>> Conflicts with Ruby executable are solved by version prefixes or tools like RVM. RVM solves plenty of other issues like isolated gem sets.
>> 
>> Every person I know who has released at least one gem has more than one Ruby installed and often uses RVM for that.
>> -- 
>> MK
>> 
>> http://github.com/michaelklishin
>> http://twitter.com/michaelklishin
>> 
> 
> But for every case you have mentioned, I would prefer to install into location with different prefix, e.g. /opt/ruby18 and /opt/ruby19 so the version numbers are useless. So again, I am wondering if somebody mixes Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 into one folder in reality, not if that is possible in theory.
> 
> 
> And exactly tools like RVM leads me to questioning the rationale behind version numbers in paths.
> 
> 
> Vit