From: Ben Crowell <crowell07@...>
Date: 2007-06-14T06:45:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting Ruby

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Ben Crowell wrote:
>> On a related topic, it turns out that if you try to compile ruby
>> from source, it won't work unless you already have ruby installed.
>> I tried it yesterday, on an ubuntu fiesty box that didn't have
>> ruby installed, and the build stopped with an error, because in
>> one place, a script tries to invoke ruby. It wasn't a huge problem
>> for me, because I was able to install the ruby 1.8 package using
>> apt, and then continue compiling 1.9. But presumably there are some
>> people out there who are compiling ruby because they can't get a
>> binary (e.g., people using unusual operating systems or cpu
>> architectures), and it would be a problem for them.
>>
> I suspect your system isn't configured correctly. I've re-compiled Ruby
> hundreds of times. There is a "miniruby" built during the install that
> runs scripts, but there should *not* be any need to install a Ruby
> binary in order to build Ruby from source. If you'd like, email me off
> list or post your error messages here, and I'll see if I can figure out
> what's wrong.
> 
Other people have posted that it works fine for them with ruby 1.8.
However, nobody has posted to say that it works for them with ruby 1.9,
which is what I was compiling. So my guess would be that it's a bug
that's crept into the packaging of ruby 1.9. I no longer have the
error message, and don't need a solution myself, since I simply
installed the 1.8 binary from the ubuntu repositories, and then
resumed my compile. This should be trivial to reproduce, however.
Just try to compile a recent nightly build on any machine that
doesn't already have ruby installed.