Does one-click install leave other installs intact?

Ruby
1

In the process of learning Ruby, so this is a newbie question…

I used the one-click (windows) Ruby install to install Ruby 1.8.4 and
afterwards I installed other Ruby classes such as OCI8 and Ruport. If
I use the one-click install to get a newer version of Ruby, will I need
to reinstall the other packages as well?

In case it matters, Ruport was installed via “gem”, while OCI8 had its
own install script.

2

My guess is that you will have to. When I upgraded to 1.8.4 from 1.8.2,
the installer asked me to remove my previous version. With that, I lost
all my installed gems and had to start from scratch. I am aware of any
other way to do this.

3

You can have multiple versions installed simultaneously (or even
multiple copies of the same version) – they just need to be installed
in separate directories. Of course, only one at a time can have its
“bin” directory on the system path, so this is the one that gets used
by default.

Extensions (including all RubyGems) are stored within the Ruby
directory tree, so they need to be installed separately for each
instance of Ruby.

4

Thanks for your response Curt…

Just to clarify; I installed 1.8.4-20 via one-click. If/when
1.8.4-22 comes out would that be considered a new version? And, more
to the point, would it cause me to need to reinstall Ruport, OCI8, and
any other add-on’s ?

In any event, it sounds like a good idea to keep track of these
add-on’s since it’s just a matter of time before they’ll need to be
reinstalled.

P.S. Thanks for your willingness to help make Ruby a success. I
became interested after reading an article on Rails, and I’ve quickly
become a fan.

5

Unftunately you would have to reinstall them. Once everything is
available as RubyGems, that shouldn’t be too much a problem, but I
know its a bit of a pain now.

Curt