> RVM shouldn't still be around because of its user-hostile behavior of modifying the user's dotfiles (.bashrc, etc.) on installation without warning or permission.
RVM tells the user very clearly that it has modified the user's dotfiles.
And how many people do not want to modify the dotfile? Which user thinks, "oooh, modifying dotfiles is so evil, I'll just type in this command every single time I open a terminal"?
At the end of the day, RVM just inserts a few lines to the dotfiles. What's the problem with that?
Actually, chruby does not modify my dotfile for me, and I thought that modifying the dotfile is optional. I figured I'll just manually source chruby.sh every time I want to use it, just to experience how it's like. And then I ran into issues like this: https://github.com/postmodern/chruby/issues/213
Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather have the software modify my dotfile so that it can give me a pleasant user experience.
> For example, I've had cases where after installing it, I could not view man pages for any programs because installing RVM modified broke my $MANPATH. In other cases, things that were failing for other reasons started producing confusing errors due to RVM doing sketchy things like replacing cd with a shell function.
Never seen these problems before. Have you reported these problems? Have they been fixed in the latest version? If these problems are fixable then why throw the baby out with the bath water?
As for replacing cd with a shell function: it's because it's one of the few ways auto-switching can be implemented. They found in a user survey that 80% of the users want auto-switching, so who are they to say "no" to their users?
What problems have you experienced because of this? chruby's auto.sh implements the same functionality by installing itself into the shell's DEBUG hook... but is that really any better?
> Which user thinks, "oooh, modifying dotfiles is so evil, I'll just type in this command every single time I open a terminal"?
I did. And it's not "every single time I open a terminal", it's "the once in a blue moon that I need to work on a legacy Rails app".
> They found in a user survey that 80% of the users want auto-switching
Obviously people who choose to use RVM are going to be people who like the way that RVM operates.
> If these problems are fixable then why throw the baby out with the bath water?
The bath water is the specific bugs I ran into. As you say, those may fixed and aren't the point. The baby is the general practice of automatically injecting things into dotfiles and messing with shell builtins. We should throw that away because when it fails, it leads to "spooky action at a distance" bugs that are hard to understand and that break totally unrelated things (the user is in a shell session where they aren't doing anything related to Ruby).
RVM tells the user very clearly that it has modified the user's dotfiles.
And how many people do not want to modify the dotfile? Which user thinks, "oooh, modifying dotfiles is so evil, I'll just type in this command every single time I open a terminal"?
At the end of the day, RVM just inserts a few lines to the dotfiles. What's the problem with that?
Actually, chruby does not modify my dotfile for me, and I thought that modifying the dotfile is optional. I figured I'll just manually source chruby.sh every time I want to use it, just to experience how it's like. And then I ran into issues like this: https://github.com/postmodern/chruby/issues/213
Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather have the software modify my dotfile so that it can give me a pleasant user experience.
> For example, I've had cases where after installing it, I could not view man pages for any programs because installing RVM modified broke my $MANPATH. In other cases, things that were failing for other reasons started producing confusing errors due to RVM doing sketchy things like replacing cd with a shell function.
Never seen these problems before. Have you reported these problems? Have they been fixed in the latest version? If these problems are fixable then why throw the baby out with the bath water?
As for replacing cd with a shell function: it's because it's one of the few ways auto-switching can be implemented. They found in a user survey that 80% of the users want auto-switching, so who are they to say "no" to their users?
What problems have you experienced because of this? chruby's auto.sh implements the same functionality by installing itself into the shell's DEBUG hook... but is that really any better?