On Jan 5, 2008 11:30 AM, Geoffrey C. [email protected]
wrote:
It may be good enough but it’s built for i386 and you get the features
redhat chose to install with it. The one on my local machine is: ruby 1.8.6
(2007-09-23 patchlevel 110) [i686-darwin9.1.0]. If nothing else it is
compiled for i686 rather than i386 which means the compiler can use 686
instructions to build my version of ruby rather than be limited to 386
instructions in yours.
I’ll also like to point that some of these distros build ruby with
–enable-pthreads, just for the sake of compatibility with Tk.
If oyu don’t plan to use Tk (mostly you wouldn’t), you can have a bit
performance boost.
Ezra pointed me that fact a few months back when talking about ruby
builds inside EY.
If you build your own you can control what features are installed and the
gems library will not mix with what ever gems redhat chose to install. (I
don’t remember if they actually install gems or not so I may be off base
here.)
Yes, the mix is a bit problematic and something like rubygems update
raised a lot of issues.
Users using their distro packaged rubygem tried to use ‘gem update
–system’ and thus, ended with a broken rubygems.
If you build your own ruby, you don’t have to worry about that 
–
Luis L.
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