I'm not really sure I understand your question. RVM is a tool that can do all of that for me, and it's used and vetted by a large community. I don't know why I

I'm not really sure I understand your question. RVM is a tool that can do all of that for me, and it's used and vetted by a large community. I don't know why I wouldn't use RVM. RVM automates the compilation step. I'm not sure why I'd want to do that by hand instead. Gem installation is done on a per-app basis using bundler[0] or RVM's gemsets, so the gems for each application are kept separate anyway. Running different applications on different versions of Ruby at once is also easy with project-level rvmrc files. And if for whatever reason you want different RVM installs for different users that's easy too: RVM only installs for a single user by default. Now, granted, I don't do anything like run a shared hosting service, and there may be cases where RVM lacks the flexibility to do what's required, but I've never run into them. [0] http://rubygems.org/gems/bundler http://rubygems.org/gems/bundler