Install Guides and the FHS about chruby

[havenwood]

BSD's filesystem hierarchy does diverge from Linux's. (http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/dirstructure.html)

Follow Darwin/BSD style, Linux style, or some hybrid? Dunno.

[postmodern]

The way chruby works does require encapsulated Rubies. We're leaning towards /usr/local/rubies, /opt/rubies, ~/.rubies/. /opt/ is really a dumping ground for non-standard packages (ex: SecondLife client); also sort of like /usr/local/games/.

[postmodern]

After further thought, I agree with @havenwood, requiring BSD/OSX users to run sudo mkdir /opt would be obtrusive; also I doubt BSD admins would appreciate an /opt in their environment. Putting rubies into /usr/local/ avoids conflicts with the package manager, plus isolating them into /usr/local/rubies/ (much like the ancient /usr/local/games/) prevents any conflicts with other user installed software. Having the Rubies somewhere within /usr/local/ keeps them coupled with their source in /usr/local/src/.

[trans]

I doesn't matter much to me b/c I am doing things differently anyway, but using /usr/local/rubies is technically against FHS and even BSD's filesystem hierarchy standard. I have my issues with these (archaic) standards, but even so I try to stay in their graces. It can get pretty ugly when everyone starts to do otherwise. I've already seen two other applications doing this kind of thing too, foreman and heroku. Not to mention ry, rbfu and rbenv do their own take on all this.

I've run into this problem before myself and unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any clear place for this kind of layout. I wonder what FHS people would say if asked about it. Maybe I'll try to do that. What I ended up doing in the past was using opt under local. e.g. /usr/local/opt/rubies and ~/.local/opt/rubies. It's not technically supported either but its in line with the spirit of the FHS and it's symmetrical. Of course, on the downside it means even longer paths.

[havenwood]

Hrmm, /usr/local/opt/rubies makes a lot of sense, but is it okay to put a dir like rubies/ that contains specific ruby implementations folders there? Does a rubies/ directory fit better in /usr/local/opt/ instead of /usr/local/?

[postmodern]

BSD's hier(7) doesn't define any /opt, yet MacPorts uses /opt/local/ and Homebrew uses /usr/local/opt/. Also reading over the definition of /opt/ we should probably change the instructions to install into /opt/$ruby/. We can also include a sudo mkdir -p /opt command for the OSX specific pre-install instructions. We can also update feature #29 to check for /opt/{ruby,rubinius,jruby}*.

Next we should decide on a standard location for user installed Rubies. ~/.rubies/, ~/.local/rubies/, ~/.local/opt/$ruby/?

[havenwood]

+1 ~/.rubies/

[postmodern]

Win, according to FHS, /opt/<provider>/<package> is allowed, where <provider> is one of these. Perhaps in the future we could register a common Ruby namespace with LANANA.

[postmodern]

Updated the Wiki pages. Opinionated/constrained users can always change the --prefix option to install elsewhere.