RVM

Posted: 2 years ago (2009-12-04 20:36:55 UTC )

I've been playing with RVM, the Ruby Version Manager. I love the concept, and it has the potential to make a lot of my gem debugging a lot easier, and solve some of my problems with Ruby version compatibility.

Alas, the reality has a few rough edges left. The worst rough edge is that in at least some cases, it appears that a simple "require" can't find the gems repository for the specific Ruby sub-version you're using. That's huge, and I'm sure that there's some simple way to fix it, because rvm is 100% useless when it's doing this.

rvm also still uses your main gem repository gems, which can be a bit confusing -- half the reason to use something like rvm is to make it clear where your gems are and aren't, and to control that quite closely. Having to have a system ruby and presumably system gems to install rvm pretty much guarantees that there are other gems installed, and keeping them in the path pretty much guarantees confusion. Alas.

Still, it's amazing that you can just type "rvm install 1.9.1" and have it compile and install everything for you, or "rvm install jruby" or "rvm install rubinius", and keep them all on your system, with separate gem repositories, and as many named extra repositories as you like...

The promise is amazing. Unfortunately, currently it looks like you pretty much need to design your Ruby setup around rvm, and do so quite carefully.

So in a nutshell, it looks like an alpha-quality, absolutely amazing project. Can't wait for beta quality...