What comes first, the ruby chicken or the homebrew egg?

Question

Whilst installing Ruby on OsX I noticed I could do so by using a package manager called Homebrew. This seemed like an easy option, so I took it. Everything worked smoothly. Life was good.

Being a curious fellow, I looked into what other benefits having homebrew installed would give me, and in my study found that Homebrew is written in ruby.

Woah, wait a minute! How is it then, that I can install Ruby using something that is written in Ruby, not already having Ruby on my system, and once installed said ruby based system I STILL have to install ruby separetely?

Warning: Do not read this question aloud. You risk getting a Kaiser Chiefs single stuck in your head for the remainder of the day.

How are you sure you don't have ruby on your system? – Eimantas Aug 30 '11 at 09:57 — Eimantas, Aug 30 '11 at 09:57

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 30 '11 at 09:56

2

OS X comes pre bundled with system ruby. If you typed which -a ruby I'm pretty sure you'd get at least 3 results: system, homebrew and linked-to-homebrew.

It is also possible that homebrew installation is written in sh which in turn downloads and compiles ruby for itself.

update

Just do ln -h /usr/bin/ruby. It should tell you that it's symlink from system folder.

answered Aug 30 '11 at 09:56

Eimantas

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I get two, /usr/bin/ruby & /usr/local/bin/ruby – Mild Fuzz Aug 30 '11 at 09:58
/usr/bin/ruby is the system one (which is linked from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/...) – Eimantas Aug 30 '11 at 09:58

What comes first, the ruby chicken or the homebrew egg?

1 Answers1