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Comment by wolframarnold | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I would agree strongly. The folks who'll use this are beginners and nothing sucks more than having some weird one-off environment that nobody else uses. I teach a lot of Ruby classes and I always tell people to do things in the most common way. That way, if they need help, the people helping them will feel right at home, and anything the beginners might google themselves will also apply. This is not the case if your one click installer doesn't follow the most common paths. It's convention over configuration, remember? Lastly, what I've been missing in the one click installer discussion is maintainability and upgradability. This is exactly the problem that brought about tools like bundler, rvm, homebrew or Debian/Ubuntu packaging.

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Sssooooo yeah. Let me speak for the beginners such as myself.

A week or two before Yehuda announced his KS, I decided I wanted to fuck around with ROR. I blew like a half a day wrestling with Locomotive. Then I followed... some reciepe, I couldn't tell you where I found it.

By the time I got that working I had blown the whole day. And I had no energy to actually try, you know. Fucking with ROR. I still haven't.

And ever since I did this, I've been having problems with something filling up the limited space on my Air. When I reboot it goes back to normal, but within a week I've got my computer bitching about being out of space.

Is it something my installation of ROR and it's support infrastructure is doing? Hell, I don't know. And since I honestly have no idea what exactly I installed where, it's pretty much impossible for me to uninstall ROR and it's infrastructure to find out if it's the cause.

If I'd been using a self-contained package like MAMP (or like what Locomotive used to be) then I'd be able to nuke it at the drop of a hat instead of spending a day or two trying to piece together what I did, try to remove a ton of command-line packages, and hope I don't accidentally kill off something my machine actually depends on for basic operation.

I think it is very very important for beginners to be able to say "gee I didn't get into this and I need space" and quickly remove it. Your method of using "the most common way" is very hostile to this.

rvm lets you very easily uninstall everything:

    rvm implode

oh man thank you!

runs to her terminal

tealfour:~ egypt$ rvm implode -bash: rvm: command not found

Well poop. Thanks anyway!

Haha. Did you follow the install instructions and append that "[...] && ..." line to your .bashrc? It is necessary to load rvm into your console.

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