Building and installing Ruby 1.8.5 on Mac OS X TigerEdit

Created , updated

These notes were made during the upgrade from Ruby 1.8.4 to Ruby 1.8.5 on my Mac OS X Tiger machine.

Build

wget "ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz"
tar zxvf ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.5
./configure
make
make test
sudo make install
make check

Test failures

Unlike the last version, this version fails catastrophically at the make check phase:

test succeeded
./miniruby ./runruby.rb --extout=.ext -- -C "./test" runner.rb --runner=console
dyld: NSLinkModule() error
dyld: Symbol not found: _rl_filename_completion_function
  Referenced from: /Users/wincent/trabajo/ruby/ruby-1.8.5/.ext/i686-darwin8.7.1/readline.bundle
  Expected in: flat namespace

make: *** [test-all] Trace/BPT trap

Based on a suggestion in this mailing list post I tried the following and it seems to work:

cd ext/readline
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo cp readline.bundle /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-darwin8.7.1/
cd ../..
make check

Documentation

In order for the documentation to be installed and accessible to ri you must explicitly install it. I only discovered this months after building Ruby 1.8.5. When I went back to my Ruby source folder and tried sudo make install-doc it didn’t work because there was no longer a Makefile. I therefore had to reconfigure first:

./configure
sudo make install-doc

See also