ruby_select and rvm

[David Baumgold]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Joseph Holsten
<joseph at josephholsten.com> wrote:
> David Baumgold wrote:
>
>> As far as I can tell, MacPorts has very poor support for Ruby 1.9. I'm
>> going to be taking a class that requires using Ruby 1.9, so I have a
>> big incentive to fix this. :) I know that MacPorts Python has the
>> python_select port -- is there an equivalent ruby_select port? (I
>> haven't found one, but I want to be sure.) I also recently discovered
>> a project called rvm (http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/) which is
>> designed for exactly this purpose. Can a more experienced MacPorts
>> developer tell me what would be required to package rvm so that it
>> works with MacPorts, and give me some tips for how to go about doing
>> so?
>
> Typical gem installation is done by
>
> % gem install rvm
>
> Gem portfiles are amazingly simple to create, see http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/ruby/rb-actionmailer/Portfile for a good example.

Yeah, I've actually created a few Gem portfiles, myself. However, the
Ruby PortGroup seems to assume that you are installing for Ruby 1.8,
and I'm going to need some of the Gems for Ruby 1.9 -- in particular,
Gems like Rake and RubyGems, which at the moment are only available
for Ruby 1.8, as far as I can tell. In fact, the only Ruby Gem
available for Ruby 1.9 at the moment is the rb19-mysql port. Or is
there a way to tell Macports to install a Gem written for 1.8 into a
Ruby 1.9 enviornment?

> I should mention that I could not make ruby 1.9 work through rvm, but my macports install runs perfectly. Strange that your setup would be opposite.

Oh, that's not what I meant. I can install and run ruby 1.9 perfectly
fine. The issue is that the default Macports ruby is still Ruby 1.8:
when I run "irb" it loads up 1.8, and I have to run "irb1.9" to load
up 1.9. Macports can install multiple versions of Python
simultaneously, and which version is called when you run "python" at
the terminal is controlled by the python_select port. I'm saying that
it would be really nice to have a similar "ruby_select" port, so that
I could decide that I want Ruby 1.9 to be the default Ruby
installation on my system, and just type "irb" to get a Ruby 1.9
prompt. I figured that rvm would be a good way to start doing this,
since it already contains infrastructure for setting system default
interpreters like this. Does that make sense?