asdf VS rbenv

asdf or compatible .tool-versions file

In this article, we will use a version manager called asdf‑vm, or simply asdf.

This, but here are some things I've learned to do:

* Use a .local directory under my home directory instead of ~/bin. That's a great prefix when installing from source or tarball at the user level, keeps the top-level of the home directory from getting cluttered with /share /lib /include /etc /lib etc. etc.

* Reach for the package manager first when installing new software, unless there is a good reason not to. It makes keeping things up-to-date easy, and since I use Arch, which uses a rolling release, you pretty much get the latest stuff.

* If I can't get what I want from the package manager, I'll look at what is available using asdf-vm (https://asdf-vm.com/), and failing that, build from source or install from tarball.

* I don't use snap or the like.

I gave up on Windows over 20 years ago, and I can't say enough how liberating it has been. One of the nicest things is that there is a distro for almost every need (see https://distrowatch.com/). I use Arch; but your use case may point to a beginner-friendly distro, such as Mint, Ubuntu, etc., or a repeatable install type of distro, such as NixOS or Guix, or many others.

# Download asdf git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.15.0 # Add the following to ~/.zshrc . "$HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh" # Optional: Completions are configured by either a ZSH Framework asdf plugin # or by adding the following to your .zshrc: fpath=(${ASDF_DIR}/completions $fpath) autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

asdf is a popular version manager that uses a technique called "shimming" to switch between different versions of tools like Python, Node.js, and Ruby. It creates temporary paths to specific versions, modifying the environment to ensure that the correct version of a tool is used in different projects. However, this method can introduce performance overhead due to how these shims work.

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

rbenv is installed and ready to go;

sudo apt update sudo apt install -y build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev git git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc echo 'eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc source ~/.zshrc git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build rbenv install 3.0.3 rbenv global 3.0.3

# Download rbenv curl -fsSL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv/archive/refs/tags/v2.8.2.tar.gz | tar -xz -C ~/.rbenv --strip-components=1 # Add rbenv to the shell path echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc # Reload shell configuration source ~/.bashrc

rbenv is a version management tool for Ruby. It allows you to switch between multiple Ruby versions without needing to mess with your system’s default Ruby installation. With rbenv, you can:

The first step was upgrading the Ruby version. I used rbenv for managing the Ruby version on my Mac. I used .ruby-version file for managing active Ruby versions.

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv ~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv init

If you're on your own workstation you may want to consider using rbenv to allow you to quickly switch between versions of Ruby that your other project may depend upon.

When I was technical blogging on how to learn from open-source code [1], I used it quite frequently to get unstuck and/or to figure out how to tease apart a large question into multiple smaller functions. For example, I had no idea how to break up this long `sed` command [2] into its constituent parts, so I plugged it into ChatGPT and asked it to break down the code for me. I then Googled the different parts to confirm that ChatGPT wasn't leading me astray.

If I had asked StackOverflow the same question, it would have been quickly closed as being not broadly applicable enough (since this `sed` command is quite specific to its use case). After ChatGPT broke the code apart for me, I was able to ask StackOverflow a series of more discrete, more broadly-applicable questions and get a human answer.

TL;DR- I quite like ChatGPT as a search engine when "you don't know what you don't know", and getting unblocked means being pointed in the right direction.

1. https://www.richie.codes/shell

2. https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv/blob/e8b7a27ee67a5751b899215b...