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I've been reading about virtualization layers and this came up to me when I was getting into Application Virtualization.

May I consider RVM use of Gemsets a form of Application Virtualization? Given that it allows several versions of gems coexist in the same system.

Am I wrong?

Adrian Ferreyra
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  • even without rvm you can have several versions of gems on the same system. Currently I have 10 versions of `activerecord` under just 1 ruby version and I have 4 ruby versions installed (didn't feel like counting and de-duping all the versions of `activerecord` I actually have installed). I believe application virtualization would be something more like [docker](https://www.docker.com/) that would package the whole environment for the application into an isolated container. – engineersmnky Dec 09 '16 at 21:56

1 Answers1

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RVM(Ruby Version Manager) Allows you to have multiple versions of Ruby installed, and you can switch versions using rvm use, it has nothing to do with virtualization, it basically configures a bunch of Environment variables for you.

Ex:

$ env | grep -i rvm | awk -F= '{print $1}'
MANPATH
rvm_bin_path
GEM_HOME
IRBRC
MY_RUBY_HOME
rvm_path
rvm_prefix
PATH
rvm_version
GEM_PATH

The biggest problem it solves IMO is to manage Ruby installations for non privileged user.

Tiago Lopo
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