I was quite excited to see the announcement of improved Ruby and Rails support in Leopard, and one of the first things I did after upgrading was to delete my MacPorts installations of Ruby and RubyGems, and try using the built-in ones instead.
For a while, all seemed well. The milk was cold, the food stayed fresh, my specs still passed, my Rails projects still worked, and even the light worked when you opened the door.
But then the trouble started.
Firstly I tried updating and installing gems while behind a firewall. The gem command completely ignored my http_proxy setting, and when I explicitly provided the proxy using -p, I got this error:
ERROR: While executing gem ... (NoMethodError)
undefined method `[]=' for #
I worked round this by downloading the gems manually and installing the local copies (despite this being a pain, especially when there are dependencies).
I then tried using gemsonrails to freeze some gems, and it got confused by the fact that Leopard stores built-in gems separately from user-installed ones. Thinking about it, if I’d successfully frozen the gem, it might have turned out to have been tweaked in some Mac-specific way and broken on other platforms.
Forgetting about that issue, I carried on with other work for a while, then found that autotest wouldn’t work, and mysteriously was trying to run something from /opt/local (where MacPorts install lived). Even after removing any gem-related scripts from /opt/local/bin, the problem persisted.
Oh well, looks like I’ll be re-installing everything using MacPorts. I’m not sure whether all these problems are intrinsic to the Ruby installation that comes with the system, or whether some are caused by lingering remains of my MacPorts installation – I’d be interested to hear how others got on.
[tags]ruby, rails, mac, 10.5, leopard[/tags]