Compiling Ruby 1.9.3 from source

I had to install Ruby 1.9.3 from source today.

Ruby comes with a load of documentation but I never use it. It's just easier to look it up on the web. But creating and installing that documentation takes a huge amount of time.

To disable it pass this option to 'configure'
$ ./configure --disable-install-doc

The other issue I had to deal with was that libyaml was installed in a non-standard location. With some libraries you can pass a specific option to 'configure' but not here... Instead you have to add the include and lib directories to Environment variables, like this:
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I/my/location/include"
$ export LDFLAGS="-L/my/location/lib"

'configure' will pick those up without any additional arguments.