install from ruby checkout on local machine

[fables-tales]

as far as I can tell, there isn't a way to provide ruby-install with a directory path to a ruby checkout on my machine. It'd be nice to have it be able to install a ruby from a working directory so that I can test out patches in a more long term. Is this a use case that could be supported?

[havenwood]

It's not directly supported, but you can pair --src-dir with --no-extract to effectively install a Ruby from a working directory if the directory is named as expected. For example, you can install current trunk with:

git clone git@github.com:ruby/ruby.git ruby-2.7.0dev --depth 1
ruby-install --no-extract --src-dir . ruby-2.7.0dev

There currently isn't a flag that sets the $src_dir/$ruby_dir_name directly for an arbitrarily-named $ruby_dir_name.

[havenwood]

A possibility would be to add a --ruby-src-dir option. Maybe something like:

-S, --ruby-src-dir DIR         Source code directory of a particular Ruby

[postmodern]

Part of ruby-install's philosophy is that it explicitly does not support installing from trunk/master. Although, I am considering making a separate utility called ruby-dev for cloning and building development versions of rubies. If you only want to apply patches to the current version, than you can specify the -p,--patch FILE option to apply additional patches to the extracted Ruby's source code before compilation.