What are the alternatives to Ruby Version Manager (rvm)? [closed]

Here is the list of available alternatives https://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/blob/master/docs/alt.md

There is one big difference between RVM and the rest of tools - RVM has big experience with a lot of corner cases, it covers many possible configurations, it is used on many different *nix distributions.

So all the small tools cover the minimalistic way of doing things, like installation:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/rubies/1.9.3makemake install

Q: what prevents you from doing it ? A: Experience, do you know it will exactly build and run on any system you try ? RVM does just that it tries to provide you one way to install on every system.

The mentioned ruby 1.9.3 will most likely compile just fine, but for example you can use patches, RVM does provide already many patches, few of them are installed automatically to solve compilation/building issues, like ruby 1.8.7 or 1.8.6.

But there are other things, you want to use JRuby on production (it happens to be faster) so you need to test it ... in 1.9 mode ? that's easy just say to RVM to use 1.9 mode:

rvm install jruby-1.6.7 --1.9

now it will be by default using 1.9 mode and trust me getting there is not that easy - at least for now.

There is a lot of things which RVM does to you and for you, with latest development version you can use other project files not only .rvmrc -> https://gist.github.com/1912050#gistcomment-86549 you could play for example using .ruby-version project file which is already supported by rbfu and always get back to RVM if you feel like you need more.