Ruby and ri(1) ruby information

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Phil Dobbin <bukowskiscat at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20/12/13 10:35, Colin Law wrote:
>
>
> [snip for brevity's sake]
>
>
>>>
>>> kevin at treat:~$ ri String
>>> Nothing known about String
>>> kevin at treat:~$
>>>
>>> Same for Array, or any of a bunch of others.
>>
>>
>> I have not come across that problem on standard Ubuntu, where ruby is
>> not installed by default.  Google suggests that
>>
>> gem install rdoc rdoc-data
>> rdoc-data --install
>> might sort it, but I don't know.
>>
>> By the way, if you want to get seriously into ruby then use rvm (or
>> possibly rbenv, but I have no experience of that myself) which will
>> manage versions of gems and ruby.
>
>
> I heartily agree. RVM is the way to go. You can install, as a single user
> installation, in $HOME/ &, apart from very rare instances, never have to use
> 'sudo'.
>
> Also it'll give you the chance to use Ruby v2 which has considerable
> improvements. Ruby 1.8.7 is EOL...
>
> Cheers,
>
>   Phil.

I'm not sure I'm getting all of this.  When you say "install" do you
mean "apt-get install" or one of the ruby things that manages
packages?  To the extent possible, I'd like to avoid confusing one
package manager with updates done by another.  I don't know if that's
an issue with Ruby; I'm just asking to verify because of all of this
talk about gem or rvm doing package management.

My attempt to "gem -install ...." failed with cryptic error messages,
posted in the original thread.

I'm running Ruby 1.9, which matches the book I have, and seems to be
the latest thing in the repositories.  I'm not so interested in the
latest and greatest until I get that book under my skull.

Thanks,

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
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