From: Benjohn Barnes <benjohn@...>
Date: 2007-12-10T06:45:40+09:00
Subject: Gem trouble

I've been trying to use gems to instal rucola, and things aren't  
going too well.

I'm using os x 10.4, and Ruby 1.8.2 on a power PC machine. My gem  
version is 0.9.5

I was getting this segmentation fault:

> /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/package.rb:620: [BUG]  
> Segmentation fault
> ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [powerpc-darwin8.0]

I checked the line mentioned, and found this:

>     # NOTE:  Originally this method used two approaches, Return a  
> GZipReader
>     # directly, or read the GZipReader into a string and return a  
> StringIO on
>     # the string.  The string IO approach was used for versions of  
> ZLib before
>     # 1.2.1 to avoid buffer errors on windows machines.  Then we  
> found that
>     # errors happened with 1.2.1 as well, so we changed the  
> condition.  Then
>     # we discovered errors occurred with versions as late as  
> 1.2.3.  At this
>     # point (after some benchmarking to show we weren't seriously  
> crippling
>     # the unpacking speed) we threw our hands in the air and  
> declared that
>     # this method would use the String IO approach on all platforms  
> at all
>     # times.  And that's the way it is.
>     def zipped_stream(entry)
>       # This is Jamis Buck's ZLib workaround.  The original code is
>       # commented out while we evaluate this patch.
>       entry.read(10) # skip the gzip header
>       zis = Zlib::Inflate.new(-Zlib::MAX_WBITS)
>       is = StringIO.new(zis.inflate(entry.read))
>       # zis = Zlib::GzipReader.new entry
>       # dis = zis.read
>       # is = StringIO.new(dis)
>     ensure
>       zis.finish if zis
>     end


So I swapped out the patch and reverted to the earlier version. This  
seems to have worked around the SEG fault, but now I'm getting this  
instead:

> ERROR:  While executing gem ... (TypeError)
>     cannot convert nil into Array

This is all the errors / diagnostic information I get with the -V  
(verbose) option.

Can anyone adviseon getting everything working smoothly again? My  
apologies if I have left out critical and obvious diagnostic  
material. I've just done a disk verify, and that's also come up clean  
(not sure how thorough the Mac "Disk Utility" is).

Thanks very much,
	Benjohn