I used to use RVM with gemsets and loved it. Wayne’s work is amazing and way beyond any shell-fu I know. I was super impressed as I started and used it for at least a year on my main dev box.

Then I upgraded ruby a few times and that was ok. But then I sudo’d to root and got:
# ~/.rvm does not exist (or something)

Here are some things I didn’t like:

• Gemsets are great except when you are managing different global gemsets on different boxes.
• Maybe you work on a project that maybe doesn’t use RVM and you wonder if they really want an .rvm-gemset file in their project root.
• I loved upgrading my default ruby using RVM until it failed and I had to recreate all gemsets and reinstall all gems.
• Gemset exporting I never really got.

Rbenv is better?

So I’ve switched to no gemsets and rbenv. I just use rbenv and ruby-build. Rbenv seems to runs a lot lighter and doesn’t complain on sudo.

RVM is better?

RVM beats rbenv in gemsets though. Rbenv gemsets don’t have global so you have to create a pre-install rails just to `rails new`. It’s a chicken before the egg thing. There’s no global gemset so rails doesn’t exist and you don’t have a directory to create the .rbenv-gemsets file in. So you have to create a tmp rails project with like the Rails 3.0 generator. And then you have to upgrade that project or something.

update:This might not be true. If you delete your .rbenv-gemsets file out of your home directory and make sure that each project has it’s own gems installed then `gem` will be global and you can install/remove gems as normal. So your global gemset is when `rbenv gemset active` returns nothing.

Upgrading ruby versions with rbenv does not import your gems. So you have to wait until you need them and install them with `bundle` or pre-cd into each of your projects to install them?

So that’s why I went with a third option.

No Gemsets at all!

Bundler works but with no gemsets, you end up with a lot of dupe versions that don’t hurt anything. You can bundle exec foo and the correct version of foo will be loaded. However, I do miss having clean gemsets. This list grows and grows without end.

> gem search rails
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
rails (3.2.8, 3.2.2, 3.0.16)


Having dupe versions is kind of annoying after a while, especially if you wanted to create a mobile rails dev env on a usb key. You don’t know what your dependencies are. Or do you? You can go until a project with Bundler and do:

> bundle list
Gems included by the bundle:
* abstract (1.0.0)
* actionmailer (3.0.16)
* actionpack (3.0.16)
* activemodel (3.0.16)
...


Then I guess I could copy all the gems somewhere. But it’s not automatic. With gemsets, each project was in a directory and I could just grab all the *.gem files.

tl;dr

So there’s pros and cons to each method. I have no problems without gemsets but I don’t have cleanliness. I just don’t know what the downside to having a messy system is. Honestly, a patch to `gem` where gem list would just colorize the list from bundle list would be awesome.