On Monday 13 Jan 2014 11:03:32 Bigby James wrote: > That was how I discovered the multi-version dependencies: As pacman will > only allow a single version of a package to be installed on the system at a > given time, I was frequently alerted to "updates" of dependency gems I had > installed. Middleman depends on a later version of a particular library > than does Jekyll; if I update the gem via pacgem, Middleman will function, > while Jekyll will break. It simply wasn't possible to use both > simultaneously, and since I depend on Jekyll for work I do, that's > unacceptable. It's far simpler (in my opinion) to use "gem install" as > $USER to install to my /home directory and add the installation directory > to $PATH, as I'm the only one who uses my machine. In the event that gems > do (for whatever horrific reason) become unmanageable, one can simply nuke > the directory where they're installed and reinstall all necessary gems > rather quickly, without risk to the system at large.
Thanks, Bigby, for articulating the point far better than I was doing :) I'd like to add to this that I also use Ruby for general scripting and monitoring on several servers that I maintain, mostly through cron jobs. These small system scripts run as root. I could install the gems into /root, but I prefer to have them installed system-wide, as they're more visible that way (element of least surprise), and means I can write and test the scripts as non-root first. That's why I use "sudo gem install" to manage system gems, and why I remove the --user-install option in my /etc/gemrc. Paul
