From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-06-04T00:54:42+09:00
Subject: Re: general query about ruby libraries

On Tuesday 03 June 2008, Sandip Gangakhedkar wrote:
> What about tarballs? Or zip files?
> I am aware of RubyGems. However, lots of new and recent libraries,
> especially the ones hosted on github are not yet available as gems.
>
> Thanks,
> Sandip

To know where ruby looks for files, you can look at the contents of the $: 
global variable in ruby:

ruby -e 'puts $:'

On my (gentoo linux) system, the output is:
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-linux
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-linux
.

On other systems, the output may vary. I think that the most correct place to 
put user-installed libraries is under the site_ruby/1.8 directory.

An alternative could be to install them in any place you like and set the 
environment variable RUBYLIB to include that directory. For instance, if I 
decided to install some ruby libraries in /home/stefano/ruby_libraries, I 
should put the line (assuming a bash shell)

export RUBYLIB=/home/stefano/ruby_libraries

in my .bashrc file.

At any rate, unless you have very good reasons to install the library in a 
custom place, I think you should use the site_ruby directory, as I said above.

I hope this helps

Stefano