Ruby pains, May 2012 edition

While I’m still trying to figure out how to get the logs analysed for the tinderbox, I’ve been spending some time to work on Gentoo’s Ruby packaging again, which is something that happens from time to time as you know.

In this case the spark is the fact that I want to make sure that my systems work with Ruby 1.9. Mostly, this is because the blog engine I’m using (Typo) is no longer supported on Ruby 1.8, and while I did spend some time to get it to work, I’m not interested in keeping it that way forever.

I started by converting my box database so that it would run on Ruby 1.9. This was also particularly important because Mongoid 3 is also not going to support Ruby 1.8. This was helped by the fact that finally bson-1.6 and mongo-1.6 are working correctly with Ruby 1.9 (the previous minor, 1.5, was failing tests). Next step of course will be to get them working on JRuby.

Unfortunately, while now my application is working fine with Ruby 1.9, Typo is still a no-go… reason? It still relies on Rails 3.0, which is not supported on 1.9 in Gentoo, mostly due to its dependencies. For instance it still wants i18n-0.5, which doesn’t work on 1.9, and it tries to get ruby-debug in (which is handled in different gems altogether for Ruby 1.9, don’t ask). The end result is that I’ve still not migrated my blog to the server running 1.9, and I’m not sure when and if that will happen, at this point.. but things seem to fall into place, at least a bit.

Hopefully, before end of the summer, Ruby 1.9 will be the default Ruby interpreter for Gentoo, and next year we’ll probably move off Ruby 1.8 altogether. At some later point, I’d also like to try using JRuby for Rails, since that seems to have its own advantages — my only main problem is that I have to use JDBC to reach PostgreSQL, as the pg gem does not work (and that’s upsetting as that is what my symbol collision analysis script is using).

So, these are my Ruby 1.9 pains for now, I hope to have better news in a while.