Six serious concrete defects in the configure script later, two of them more than three years old, and the answer to all six having been “just use these third party scripts that’ll massively change unrelated stuff on your machine,” I’ve come to realize that I have no idea how Ruby as a platform has come to be taken seriously.

This kind of garbengineering has never, ever gone well.  No wonder there’s a post every month or two about how they changed a one-liner and got a 30-40% speed boost: these idiots don’t know what they’re doing.