Just so you know, I'm the guy who tends to rant about using package 
managers.

When I decided to finally upgrade to programming in Ruby 1.8 (mostly 
because of the YAML stuff I'd been reading) on a Red Hat 9 system, I ran 
into a few problems.  I couldn't find a link to 1.8.1 .rpm package on the 
ruby-lang.org.  After some searching with Google and a number of dead 
ends, I found a package at www.caliban.org.  When I went to install it, 
this package wanted db4 4.1.  Red Hat 9 has db4 4.0.  After more 
searching, I installed the db4 package from Fedora Core 1.  So, now 
everything seems to be installed and running well, it just tooks hours of 
work to make it happen (and apt complains about having two versions of db4 
installed).

My thanks to the folks who put together the package, I would have stuck 
with 1.6.8 otherwise.  I would like to suggest that the rpms should be 
available from a link on ruby-lang.org.

-- Matt
Attitude:  The difference between ordeal and adventure