In which I whine about tools.

I’m sure for developers who work with Ruby the maze of tools, installs, and dependencies is like swimming in water to a fish. Except just from work, the fishes complain a lot about it too. For me, though, it’s so fucked up I want to throw something at it.

Let’s say I want to install Ruby and Rails on my Mac.

% brew install ruby
(vwhoosh! works)
% gem install rails
(bombs on crazy UnknownHost error)
% gem install rails
(vwhoosh! installs a ton of stuff)
% rails –version
Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version, simply type:

$ sudo gem install rails

You can then rerun your “rails” command.

(cursing)

Okay, so let’s figure out how to do that. Stack Overflow answer says this is a command line tools issue. Do I have the command line tools? I’ll check — Crap, it returns a “Can’t install software because it is not currently available in the Software Update server” error. That makes no goddamn sense.

Back to Stack Overflow… ah! That’s a bug. I guess I’m actually fine. BLARGH.

Except rails will install and then tells me it didn’t. Still haven’t figured that one out.

And hey — as in Python, there’s a huge set of version differences!

Q: Hey, I’m a normal dude trying to get this thing up, which version of Ruby do I —
A: (shrug)
Q: Thanks for that.

To deal with all these dependencies, I can use rvm which… I don’t even know! Woo!

This seriously makes me want to go back to wrestling with Python. Or set fire to my computer.