I would like to be able to use different versions of Ruby without getting in trouble with load paths. I currently have two versions of Ruby installed on my system.
The base package comes with my Snow Leopard install:
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [universal-darwin10.0]
It is installed as a Mac framework in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework, whereas MacRuby is located in /Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework. On Mac OS X, /usr/bin only contains symlinks to the Ruby framework, e.g.:
$ ls -l /usr/bin/rub*
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 76 29 aoû 14:37 /usr/bin/ruby@ -> \
../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/bin/ruby
I also installed a more recent Ruby from CVS which actually has all extensions in /usr/local/lib/ruby.no/:
ruby 1.9.2dev (2009-10-09 trunk 25266) [x86_64-darwin10]
If I put /usr/local/bin at the end of my PATH variable, I get the original configuration:
$ ruby -e 'puts $:'
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/powerpc-darwin10.0
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/universal-darwin10.0
/Library/Ruby/Site
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/universal-darwin10.0
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin10.0
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin10.0
But, my path is set up such that /usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin. Therefore, default Ruby is Ruby 1.9 and the load paths are:
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-darwin10
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby
/usr/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.9.1
/usr/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-darwin10
/usr/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-darwin10
However, these aren’t the correct path anymore! I can force Ruby to look at the right place by setting the RUBYLIB environment variable but I am not convinced by the results it gave:
$ irb
/usr/local/bin/irb:9:in `require': no such file to load -- irb (LoadError)
from /usr/local/bin/irb:9:in `<main>'
The problem is that I permanently encounter problems with my configuration. This may be due to conflicting load paths or applications that don’t access the same environment variables:
$ irb
irb(main):001:0> $"
=> ["enumerator.so", "e2mmap.rb", "irb/init.rb", "irb/workspace.rb", "irb/context.rb",
"irb/extend-command.rb", "irb/output-method.rb", "irb/notifier.rb", "irb/slex.rb",
"irb/ruby-token.rb", "irb/ruby-lex.rb", "readline.bundle", "irb/input-method.rb",
"irb/locale.rb", "irb.rb", "prettyprint.rb", "pp.rb", "rubygems/rubygems_version.rb",
"rubygems/defaults.rb", "thread.bundle", "thread.rb", "rbconfig.rb", "rubygems/exceptions.rb",
"rubygems/requirement.rb", "rubygems/version.rb", "rubygems/dependency.rb", "rubygems/gem_path_searcher.rb",
"rubygems/user_interaction.rb", "rubygems/platform.rb", "rubygems/specification.rb",
"rubygems/source_index.rb", "rubygems/builder.rb", "stringio.bundle", "yaml/error.rb",
"syck.bundle", "yaml/ypath.rb", "yaml/basenode.rb", "yaml/syck.rb", "yaml/tag.rb",
"yaml/stream.rb", "yaml/constants.rb", "rational.rb", "date/format.rb", "date.rb",
"yaml/rubytypes.rb", "yaml/types.rb", "yaml.rb", "rubygems/config_file.rb", "rubygems/custom_require.rb",
"rubygems.rb", "etc.bundle", "fileutils.rb"]
Likewise, I have cloned version of some programs in two bin/ directories
$ diff -rqu /usr/bin /usr/local/bin | grep "^Files"
I came to the following solution: Just append the frameworkized version of Ruby to my PATH settings:
export PATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin:$PATH
which seems to me very sad because /usr/bin is already in my path, or reverse the order of /usr/local/bin and /usr/bin when exporting my PATH variable.