Yes, you do have to know your deps, but the deps don't change very frequently. Common Ruby build tools will tell you what the deps are for your operating system

Yes, you do have to know your deps, but the deps don't change very frequently. Common Ruby build tools will tell you what the deps are for your operating system, even if you're not going to use them in production (I don't). As far as system Rubies go, I try to keep things simple. I use Debian for my systems, so I know that `/usr/local/bin` will always be first in my path, so that's where I install. This falls far short of "awful" in my opinion. There are many pieces of software that are far more difficult to compile from source.