From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-09-16T05:03:07+09:00 Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails Todd Benson wrote: > On 9/15/07, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote: >> hemant: >> >>> NOO _never_ install rubygems from apt tree, its broken. >> Why not? I'm using them with great success. They land in /var/lib/gems, >> I have /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin in my $PATH and everything works perfectly. > > Some get lucky. I've had nothing but heartache using the apt tree for > Ruby. This comes up pretty often on this list. I'm kind of at the > point now where I think your should do your own build from source. > > Todd > > It's probably *better* with Gentoo than most other distros and it's probably better with Ruby than some other packages with their own repositories, but unless the distro (or someone outside) has put a significant amount of effort into integration, you're right ... if you want to run a bleeding edge Ruby and gems, you should nuke whatever's on your distro, if anything, install everything in /usr/local from source and from the gem repository, and lie to other packages expecting to see /usr/bin/ruby when they install. I went through this with R on CentOS 5. It's a big hassle. R is in good shape on Debian, but only because there's a developer in the Debian community that repackages R and the interfaces to contributed packages. I never did get the fonts working in R, and I gave up on it. Fortunately, I didn't need to load Ruby or gems on this machine. Or stick with production stable tested configurations from the distro.