Ruby in Etch

As some of you may know, Ruby and Debian's ways of packaging software go together like Darwin and religious zealots...as in, they don't. So how should you install Ruby when using Debian Stable? How do you stay up-to-date with new versions of Ruby and gems?

By using Backports, and not worrying so much.

First, setup your box to be able to install backports of packages. Next, uninstall any Ruby-related packages. Yeah, that's right. Do you know why? Because, if you're running Etch, you're using Ruby 1.8.5! Egad! That's almost medieval. Make sure to uninstall irb and rdoc, too.

Now it's time to install shinier versions...1.8.7, to be exact:

$ sudo aptitude install -t etch-backports libruby1.8 ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8

All of that should be on one line.

There you have it. Now you've got Ruby 1.8.7 on Debian Stable (AKA "Etch"). Ruby's not complete without RubyGems, though. Download the latest version to /usr/src/ , and extract it:

$ cd /usr/src/
$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
$ tar zxf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz

Then run the setup utility:

$ cd rubygems-1.3.1/
$ sudo ruby setup.rb

Let's do one last thing to make life easier. The RubyGems setup script installed the "gem" command as /usr/bin/gem1.8 . I don't want to have to type that "1.8" every time.

$ cd /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -v -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 gem

There. Now we can run "gem" like the rest of the world.

Easy? Yar.