ruby 1.9, gems and ubuntu/debian

[lsiden]

Does anyone else in the group run on Ubuntu or Debian? I had an
experience trying to upgrade to ruby 1.9 (package "ruby1.9") and
"rubygems1.9" that I assumed goes together with ruby 1.9. What I
found surprised me.

First of all, I wound up with /usr/bin/ruby1.9, but "ruby --version"
still returned "1.8". So I had to create a symlink, /usr/bin/ruby --
> /usr/bin/ruby1.9. Ditto for "gem".

Then when I ran "gem1.9 --version", it responded "1.3.1", whereas
"gem1.8 --version" responds "1.3.5". IOW, the rubygems1.9 package is
actually 4 updates behind the rubygems1.8 package. What gives?

Lastly, I could no longer run cucumber, even when I re-installed it.

I finally gave up and decided that either the Ruby gods or the Ubuntu
gods do not want me to upgrade to 1.9. Perhaps I must spend more time
with the koans and increase my karma. ;) I uninstalled everything
and reinstalled ruby1.8 and rubygems1.8, just to be on the safe side
and not trouble the gods anymore.

Has anyone else here had similar experience trying to upgrade to 1.9?

-Larry

[Don Barlow]

I was playing around with this a little bit on a virtual machine and had some similar problems. It may be worth it to check out

Ruby Switcher http://github.com/relevance/etc/blob/3d607c8ac2f76077f27c3cbc0140b04a89f546be/bash/ruby_switcher.sh

or

RVM (Ruby Version Manager) http://rvm.beginrescueend.com

especially if you want to be able to develop new/upgrade old apps to 1.9 while still being able to maintain 1.8.x apps.

Hope that helps.

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[Larry Siden]

Those look like very useful links. 

So I guess if you need to maintain multiple versions, you have to by-pass your distro tools (in my case apt-get) with something custom.  I'm just learning so I have a strong inclination to keep things simple for now.  OTOH, being able to switch environments and compare various solutions under ruby 1.8 and 1.9 might be a worthwhile learning experience.

Larry Siden
http://umich.edu/~lsiden
734-926-9614
skype: lsiden