Why "ruby-install ruby" fails with: "E: Couldn't find package build-essential"?

Question

I've installed ruby-install like this:

brew install ruby-install

But, when I try to install ruby it fails:

$ ruby-install ruby
>>> Installing ruby 2.1.1 into /Users/mishamoroshko/.rubies/ruby-2.1.1 ...
>>> Installing dependencies for ruby 2.1.1 ...
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package build-essential
!!! Installing dependencies failed!

I'm on Mac OSX 10.9.2.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Apparently, apt-get was the first in ruby-install's package manager detection order. It was broken on my system, and this is why the error.

After I removed apt-get from my system, ruby-install picked up Homebrew and the error disappeared.