[regularfry]

> The whole ruby ecosystem is a nightmare for system administrators.

It's getting better.

John Leach over at Brightbox has a ppa with up-to-date binary ruby packages: http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/next-generation-ruby-packa... https://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ruby-ng-experiment...

I'd suggest giving them a go, and mirroring them inside your infrastructure if they work for you.

It's very annoying that checkinstall doesn't Just Work for recent ruby builds. If it did, I'd suggest that every time.

> It get's really interesting once you use puppet to install an RVM ruby version.

Yeah, don't do that.

[__mp]

>> It get's really interesting once you use puppet to install an RVM ruby version.

> Yeah, don't do that.

Why not? Puppet-RVM (https://github.com/blt04/puppet-rvm ) works very well. And puppet is basically a system documentation. Since it's clear what's installed on the machine.

[regularfry]

First, you're introducing deployment-time dependencies on network resources you don't control. The worst time to discover just how bad an idea that is is when you've just had a critical server go pop while rvm.io (for instance) is having DNS problems, and you've got clients, bosses and clients' bosses breathing down your neck to fix it.

Second, it implies you've got build tools installed on your production machines. That's bad for security.

Third, I've seen RVM screw up too much to trust it. It's got far too many moving parts, and so far I haven't found anything I need which it does that isn't done better by some other simpler tool.