I'm only managing 24 machines with puppet, so nothing fancy, but I managed to do all of the stuff I needed without writing a single line of Ruby code.
That was handy for me too as while I'm somewhat familiar with Ruby, I'm no expert at all. I can read Ruby no problem and I can write ruby that's not-quite-idiomatic and I'm terribly slow at it.
I forgot to mention that just installing ruby is a HUGE PITA on anything but the most common OSes. It took me 3h last week to get it on a CentOS installed. And I don't even want to try to get it running on our Solaris hosts...
Point is: Python is the number one scripting language (after bash) for sysadmins just like Perl used to be.
Yes I needed 1.9.3 for this silly software. And I had a little special setup so rvm failed to compile. I'm also very overwhelmed by rvm,gem,bundler etc... Python has pip,easy_install(old) and virualenv. Which are just easier to understand for me. Ruby is too much magic and is trying to do everything automatically (IMO).
Red Hat recently released Ruby 1.9.3 packages as part of "software collections"; I assume CentOS is rebuilding these and making them available the same as they do for other Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.
As a developer that primarily works on ruby, I can see it if he wanted 1.9.3. Most of the references you'll find on that tell you to use @environment_wrapper_of_the_month, and those are deep rabbit holes for people who know nothing about the language.
rbenv is a great way to get whatever version of ruby you want up and going fast. Install a couple dependencies, clone the git repo, and run the install.sh. I went from never using it to running on CentOS 6 in a half hour.
> It took me 3h last week to get it on a CentOS installed
This matches my experience with a significant amount of software on CentOS. Since CentOS is just a rebuild of RHEL, and RHEL is extremely conservative when it comes to new software, CentOS tends to be out of date at release and get progressively worse.
That being said, we use third party repos for big projects like mysql and php on the assumption that a project that size is going to be thoroughly tested.
I support Ruby apps so Ruby is on every server anyways.
With that said you can use Omnibus Chef Installer now which includes a copy of Ruby just for Chef. Good for servers where you don't need Ruby or small servers that would take awhile to compile a newer Ruby.
That was handy for me too as while I'm somewhat familiar with Ruby, I'm no expert at all. I can read Ruby no problem and I can write ruby that's not-quite-idiomatic and I'm terribly slow at it.