From: Lloyd Zusman Date: 2005-06-18T07:17:52+09:00 Subject: Confusion about gems and non-gems working together. Ever since I started installing packages via the gems mechanism, I have kept running into problems that few others seemed to have (or at least mention here). More often than I would like, a gem installation would either fail outright, or else it would get installed but not work properly, yielding errors that seemed to be non-reproducible by others. I now think that I might have figured out what is going on for me: In all the cases where I had these problems, I had non-gem installs of earlier versions of the packages. In many cases, it seems like code inside of files associated with these earlier versions would get executed instead of the code that the newer gem would use. I have a standard ruby installation with no special path settings, and yet, I still am getting these unwanted interactions between certain gems and their older, non-gem counterparts. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? If so, how did you handle it? I presume that when I install a gem, I should completely uninstall any older, non-gem versions of the same package. What is the accepted way to uninstall a package? Do I just go into the ruby tree and delete all files and directories associated with the non-gem? If so, how can I find out what is the exhaustive list of files and directories to remove for a given package? This brings up a suggestion: could the gem installer check for previously installed non-gem versions of the package in question, and then ask the user if he/she wants to optionally delete them as part of the gem install? Something like that would be massively useful, IMHO. -- Lloyd Zusman ljz@asfast.com God bless you.