Comment 10 for bug 706603

A few people discussed this issue on #ubuntu-devel and we came to the following conclusion:

1) We should coordinate this change in both Ubuntu and Debian.

2) We should change the install location for gems to /usr/local. We still have to patch upstream source as the default install location (/usr) would clash with debian packages and is not safe. Using /usr/local will yield all the benefits (is on default path, can override system packages, does not clash with system packages) without introducing any significant new issues. This would also be consistent with the way we handle python's pip tool that is similar in spirit to gems.

3) We need to apply this change to both rubygems 1.8 and ruby 1.9

4) We need to have migration path. Currently a few options are still possible but we believe that simply moving all the data to /usr/local and dropping a symlink in the old location would be sufficient.