Hey Jeroen, thanks alot for your Ruby roundtable discussion at FUDCon. I
was looking around for various solutions to the Ruby version
compatibility problem for Fedora/Yum and recalled the 'alternatives'
utility which I believe might help out w/ this problem as well.
It is shipped as part of the 'chkconfig' package so it's pretty standard
on Fedora, and was (according to the manpage) originally written for
this same problem w/ Perl.
http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_alternatives.htm
I recall using it a while back to install various various of Java side
by side in a single environment (pretty good overview here
http://lanestechblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-alternatives-in-linux-to-...).
I could see this being useful if we wanted to support installing many
different versions of the Ruby interpreter or different Ruby
interpreters entirely side by side on a single system.
One thing I'm not currently sure of is how we would handle the different
ruby lib and gem paths depending on which alternative is setup. If we
can swap in the correct lib / gem path depending on which alternative is
selected (systemwide or by the user) we should be good.
Any thoughts on this? It might be a little more complicated than doing
the different vendor/version site dirs alone but might provide a nice
way for multiple version support.
-Mo