Dan,
@jelcynek mentioned $LOAD_PATH, which isn’t something typically known to a ‘newb’.
There wasn’t any mention of purpose, and I’ve written plenty of code that was just used within the companies I’ve worked at.
Regardless, encoding is messy. In ruby core a windows encoding issue dating back to 2.2 was brought up recently, and it was only fixed in June of last year. On top of that, it was done after a few other commits to core, and, because of those, it appears it can’t be backported to 2.4 and 2.3. So, it’s only fixed from 2.5 forward. It’s similar to the problem here, as it related to loading files.
Re RubyGems, I recently did some work with it, and I found issues with CLI parameters, especially if there are build parameters in a .gemrc file. After some testing tonite, same issues when trying to script gem commands.
As you’ve mentioned, it would certainly be helpful if more testing was done before new SU releases are made available, especially re encoding. They should also update whatever can be in the ruby releases. Appveyor seems to update Bundler, Minitest, Rake, & RubyGems for most Ruby versions (see appveyor-ruby), as that’s what their customers want. Trimble should do the same…
I hope to try and work on an SU gem script that allows one to run env, list, install, uninstall, etc. Also, as you’ve pointed out, it seems that SU 2018 is mangling some of the gem ENV variables, but the ‘user install’ path seems untouched. Installing gems there would also allow people to install the gem once, and all versions of SU using the same ruby major/minor version could share the gem. That may work for @jelcynek. Unfortunately, it also is shared by standalone ruby versions, along with the .gemrc file.
Thanks, Greg