From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2006-09-17T04:56:45+09:00
Subject: Re: readline() with editing and history?

On 9/16/06, Marc Heiler <shevegen@linuxmail.org> wrote:
> "If you installed ruby from source, then readline probably didn't build
> when you built ruby because you don't have the required source files
> for the interfaces to the readline library"
>
> I think it would be awesome if a check could be added to the configure
> script, ie --enable-readline or similar. And when it cant be found,
> it wont try to compile ruby so that you can timely compile/install
> readline first again. :)

Or maybe not, since it is an optional feature, I don't know that you
really want to make sure that all of the optional features, some of
which you might not want or need are there before you can use ruby at
all.

However,  you don't need to completely re-build ruby to add an
extension which wasn't built originally. The build process for
extensions uses ruby to build the make file for each extension, and
what gets tried is logged.  So in the ruby source directory theres a
subdirectory called ext, which has a subdirectory for each extension.

in  ext/readline  you should find a file called mkmf.log which is the
log of what happened when the makefile for readline was being built.
When it's failed for me it's usually because I didn't have one of the
development include files for the library or libraries the extension
was using.

When you figure out what needs to be fixed, from the extensions
directory you can try to rebuild the extensions make file with:

     ruby extconf.rb
which when all goes well builds a makefile for the extension for your
environment.
then
     make
and
     make install


-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/