Background: vendor_ruby was introduced as a new folder in ruby 1.9 so that packages installed by a distribution's packages will have a separate place to stay. Gem is a package manager for installing ruby related programs/libs. Current layout: /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby - packages either installed here /usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] - or here, this directory contains both pacman installed packages and packages installed using the gem tool. Planned layout: /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby - manually installed files by user go here, packages shouldn't touch this /usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] - pacman packages built from gems go here /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby - ruby packages installed with pacman which aren't gems go here $HOME/.gem/ruby/[ruby_base_version] - used by the gem command to install packages unmanaged by pacman /etc/gemrc - contains "gem: --user-install" to install user installed gems with gem to $HOME/.gem/gems If the user chooses to install gems using gem, they will have to add the bin directory to the $PATH: export PATH="$PATH:$(ruby -rubygems -e 'puts Gem.user_dir')/bin". Benefits of this change include: Using the proper directory layout introduced in ruby 1.9 (using vendor_ruby). Clean separation of pacman installed packages (/usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] & /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby) from gem installed packages ($HOME/.gem/ruby/[ruby_base_version]). Problems left: The user will still be able to install to the system wide gem directory /usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] if they remove --user-install from /etc/gemrc Possible remedies: 1) Leave it as is.   If the user runs gem with --no-user-install then gem will still install the files to the system wide directory at /usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] and will install binaries to /usr/bin   This should provide a clean default and is the easiest path.   This option is still better than the one we currently use where we try to install to the system wide location by default. 2) Change all ruby pacman packages to use local _gemdir='/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby'   This would free up /usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] which we could move to /var/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] for system wide gems installed with the gem command.   Not sure if installing gems to /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby is smart yet since this might rely on undocumented behavior and could be "fixed" in future versions of ruby, still have to figure this out.   (Optional) We could leave /usr/lib/ruby/gems/[ruby_base_version] in the $LOAD_PATH in ruby for backwards compatibility so that packages using the old standard would still work.   For the optional, the work could range from a simple configure change to patching ruby. 3) ??? I'm currently leaning towards 1 since it will be a simple solution with no changes needed to existing ruby-* packages.