Installing Ruby on AIX

Question

What are some less painful ways to install Ruby on AIX?

I found out that using RVM to install Ruby might be the best option. However, installing RVM itself seems like really maddening. I found an article from IBM website on how to install RVM but there are so many prerequisites for it that I feel like it will take me days to get all that stuff installed and get working:

However, RVM does have some prerequisites. Before you continue, check your system and be sure that you have the bash, git, tar, curl, gunzip, and bunzip2 utilities installed locally. In addition, your system must have the Readline, IConv, zLib, OpenSSL, and Autoconf packages to build the Ruby interpreters. You must have the Bash shell to install RVM, but you can use RVM with the Z shell version 4.3.5 or higher after RVM is installed. git is required to automatically update RVM, and this is explained shortly.

I looked up git and it has at least 10 prerequisites (includes Python which I know has tons of prerequisites as well).

Is there any way I can install all those prerequisites in once?

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix-manage-ruby/

Answer 1

I managed to get this done a couple of years ago (ruby 2.0.0). I installed by compiling it from source as I did not have root access and wanted to install it in an afs directory anyway.

Here is my SO question and the my answer to my own question: How do I configure ruby to compile in 64 bit mode on AIX

Here are some notes I had on how to do this as well. if I recall using /usr/bin/ksh93 provided a huge speedup, I for get the details as to why, but using the default ksh installed on our servers was painfully slow.

export LIBPATH=/usr/lib
export CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/bin/ksh93
export OBJECT_MODE=64


./configure --enable-shared  --enable-load-relative  --disable-install-doc --prefix=your_install_path_here --exec-prefix=your_install_path_here/aix CC="gcc" CFLAGS="-maix64 -mminimal-toc" CXX="g++" CXXFLAGS="-maix64 -mminimal-toc" NM="nm -X64" AR="ar -X64" LDFLAGS="-maix64 -Wl,-bbigtoc" EXTLDFLAGS="-maix64 -Wl,-bbigtoc" DLDFLAGS="-shared -maix64 -Wl,-bbigtoc"

I would like to install a new version but this was really painful at the time.

Update

Another less painful way to use ruby on AIX is to install JRuby. I have done that as well, and make use of it for gui's via SWT. The biggest downside with JRuby is that it has to spin up a JVM, which takes some time. This is not a big deal for long running programs, but for short scripts it can be noticeable