3rdRail and custom Ruby on the Mac
Posted by lori, Fri Feb 20 09:51:00 UTC 2009
I was having a lot of problems with my humongous Rails project lately, with a lot of long delays, build problems, hangs, etc. This all came to a head on Wednesday, when I couldn't do anything without having 3rdRail go and hang on me. But, one of my coworkers who also uses 3rdRail was not experiencing similar problems, so I had to come to the conclusion that the problem was... me.I've been doing Rails development on my Mac for over 3 years now. This was pre-Leopard, so I had an installed-from-source Ruby that I used. I've been telling myself that this was just smart, because the Ruby that comes with Leopard now is subject to change, any time that Apple cares to issue a software update. I prefer to have my development tools under my own control.
Unfortunately, it seems that this custom Ruby install was the primary difference between my coworker and I, so on Wednesday afternoon I bit the bullet and ripped /usr/local out of my system (bye-bye custom MySQL, Apache, Ruby), and started the painful process of re-installing all the gems I needed using Apple's Ruby (yes, including the Oracle drivers and RMagick.... it wasn't a pleasant afternoon).
Well, now, don't I feel stupid... 3rdRail now builds/rebuilds my project in a reasonable amount of time, without all the stutters and hangs.
So, I'm posting this as an FYI. IF you run into build problems with 3rdRail, it might just be your Ruby install.
