(Promoting this question from ruby-talk...)

I've got installations of 1.8.7p334 and 1.9.3p0 in /usr/local. But they 
overwrite each other's libruby-static.a.

The 1.8.7 is configured with:

   ./configure

The 1.9.3 with:

   ./configure --program-suffix=19

In both cases, 'make install' installs libruby-static.a to:

   /usr/local/lib/libruby-static.a

This is causing problems when building extensions (such as eventmachine, 
which does a link test against libruby-static).

Is there some configure argument that will give libruby-static.a its own 
suffix for the 1.9.3 installation?

I tried using

   --with-rubylibprefix

but this switch doesn't affect the location or name of libruby-static.a.

Should I use --libdir to keep all of 1.9.3 separate from 1.8.7? This 
seems to produce a working, non-conflicting installation:

   ./configure --program-suffix=19 --libdir=/usr/local/lib/ruby19

Any other suggestions?