[cheapsteak]

I'm sorry I wasn't more clear, I'm wondering why there seems to be a war of sorts between which version manager to use for ruby. Are the differences between rvm, rbenv, chruby, ruby-install practical or purely ideological? There doesn't seem to be this kind of disagreement over which version manager is best in other languages, just ruby, why is that?

[djur]

There's a lot of reasons, but the most significant one is that Ruby successfully and recently made a compatibility break between versions (1.8 and 1.9), which made the ability to run multiple Ruby versions on a single machine extremely important to a large group of people. Toss in alternate implementations like JRuby and Rubinius and it's almost indispensable.

The Ruby dev team tends to prefer encouraging the community to implement competing solutions rather than adopting any of them as official. Ruby devs in general tend to be members of the "there is more than one way to do it" camp.

There isn't really much of a "war". The different version managers came to an agreement on certain things like the format of .ruby-version files, so at this point it's a personal choice akin to which text editor you use.

[whistlerbrk]

rvm hooks into the cd command which has caused people nightmare-level debugging marathons. rbenv's key feature was that it did not do that and uses a shim instead.

[regularfry]

To add a little more to the history, I made the switch from rvm to rbenv when rvm broke under me (I can't remember now whether it was `cd`-hooking or rubygems-bundler which broke the camel's back). I made the switch from rbenv to chruby when rbenv's shims broke. Chruby does so little that there's almost nothing to break, so I've stayed there.