There are two easy/sane ways to solve your problem. 1. RHEL / CentOS solve this problem with "software collections," aka "scl." Using scl gets you the advantag

There are two easy/sane ways to solve your problem. 1. RHEL / CentOS solve this problem with "software collections," aka "scl." Using scl gets you the advantages of ye olde retargetable RPMs but without all the hassle and suffering. Makes it relatively easy to scope your packages that way. 2. fpm doesn't do nearly as bad a job as it used to. Given a gem, it can correctly build it, assign its C dependencies, and assign a prefix so your gems for ruby-ee don't overlap with ruby19 or ruby18.