Best practice for installing multiple versions of Ruby, apart from rvm?

I've been running both Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9 for a few weeks now. I install Ruby 1.9 wit开发者_开发百科h the suffix 19, so that the interpreter, rake, gem, etc. commands are "ruby19", "irb19", "rake19", "gem19", etc. The 1.8.7 equivalents have no suffix and are thus defaults.

I figure that's the simplest and most transparent way to manage two versions of Ruby. I can just change the #! line of my Ruby scripts to use one version or the other.

I've read about fancier solutions that involve altering symlinks on the fly, or a full-blown solution like rvm. But I prefer the simple and transparent approach. I just wonder if there are any serious drawbacks with it.

rvm rocks! give it a chance. "full-blown solution" does not mean complicated. It works really well for switching ruby versions.