Commentators in Hacker News said that sudo gem install was the correct way to install gems as I described in my previous post.

Here is an example of the pain that can cause (https://gist.github.com/1139435):

I sudo install ronn and it is located in /usr/bin. The detailed man pages are not found. I use rvm to switch from system Ruby to Ruby 1.9.2. ronn borks. The error that is thrown is not useful.

When I install a command line tool, I really should not care what language it is written in, much less what version of the interpreter it is running on. I know next to nothing about Perl but ack appears to work just fine on my machine.

Installing tools that happen to be written in Ruby that happen to have complex dependencies happens to be a pain. I’d like to see a better path emerge.