I've tried developing Ruby on Ubuntu using the ruby packages, and it's been a huge pain every time. They've also handled ruby1.9 in a maddening way--with separa

I've tried developing Ruby on Ubuntu using the ruby packages, and it's been a huge pain every time. They've also handled ruby1.9 in a maddening way--with separate 1.9 binaries for everything. And rubygems is very broken (though it's probably their position that ruby libraries should be installed through apt also). I accept that their decisions were made with an eye towards users and they may well be the right ones for them. For developers, though, it's awful. Fortunately RVM gives the best of all worlds: it's consistent between distros and operating systems (I develop on OS X and deploy onto Ubuntu and Cent OS--everything works the same in both places). Switching between ruby versions is as simple as `rvm 1.9.2`. You can easily specify a ruby version to use for different scripts, ensuring that whatever is best for a particular program can be used. And most importantly, it just works. RVM is in my mind the biggest improvement to ruby development in the last couple of years. I'm sorry if the Debian packagers feel its encroaching on their territory, but it serves our needs as they do not.