I would not modify anything in /usr/bin directly. Apple assumes that
the system /usr/bin is theirs and unmodified and will (and have!) change
things there in updates without warning - possibly breaking your
modifications and potentially causing serious system problems.
Installing in /usr/local and prepending it to your path is the usual
unix way of doing things.
Just to speak on this point, I've been safely using the replacement solution for about 6 months now with no trouble at all. But the one thing I did after I moved /usr/bin/ruby is to make a link from /opt/local/bin/ruby (my darwinports installation) to /usr/bin/ruby.
Pathing works most of the time, but I had some problems with RadRails/Eclipse because it doesn't appear to honor pathing provided in .profile or .login.
I have become convinced that not completely obliterating the Apple-default Ruby is a mistake. The fact that my 1.8.4 politely put itself next to, instead of on top of, the 1.6.8 Jaguar Ruby has repeatedly caused malfunctions and path errors.
1) First there was the whole "hey, I installed it but it doesn't work" thing that requires learning the voodoo of .bash_profile (yea, yea, many of you can't even remember when you didn't know about it, but finding the documentation that answered the question "why do I get the wrong Ruby?" is a bitch, since it requires learning quite a bit of new vocabulary before you can even search for the answer.)
2) I got to do it all over again when I installed RubyCocoa, since .frameworks don't give a diddly-dang what's in your .bash-profile, and the 1.8.4 Ruby compile/install hadn't hunted down an earlier Ruby.framework. Debugging THAT one was extremely difficult, involving running "lsof" on my compiled program, discovering that XCode had found, and was using, a different Ruby.framework than the one I knew about, and trashing it.
3) Two days ago, I once again had a Ruby program fail because it's running the wrong Ruby, and I eventually had to give up on this one. My text editing program lets me run text through shell scripts as text filters; so I wrote a Ruby script to pretty-format HTML. Except I can't run it, because all the gems are installed into 1.8.4. The scripts inherit their environment from the text editor, which inherits it from the Finder, which does not use ~/.bash_login, nor /etc/profile, nor /etc/bashrc, nor any other file which I can find on my system.
[It's using SOMETHING, because it has PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Users/dave, which isn't what you get from "bash --noprofile"]
This time, I just gave up and hard-coded #!/usr/local/bin/ruby
Next time, I'll probably erase the entire 1.6.8 code base from my system, and replace it with links to my 1.8.4.
[OK, so this time, I hard-coded
#!/Library/Ruby/bin/ruby
but that's a different kettle of fish. There's a hard link in /usr/local/bin for the non-zero number of Ruby-related programs that think paths are legally regulated or something. Not many people appear to have noticed that Apple installs scripting languages in /Library or /System/Library, not in invisible folders, except for the command-line binaries for the languages, which are in /usr/bin. ]
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On Jul 14, 2006, at 20:37, Mat Schaffer wrote:
On Jul 14, 2006, at 8:31 PM, Ryan Raaum wrote:
