rubygems1.8 does not work - apppears misconfigured

[Peter Goodall]

I installed ruby 4.5, and rubygems1.8 from the Synaptic Package Manager, and tried to do
  sudo gem install ruby-debug, and am getting error messages that are beyond my capacity to fix. The transcript from the terminal follows:

myuser@diglit-desktop:~$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10 patchlevel 249) [i486-linux]
myuser@diglit-desktop:~$ sudo gem install ruby-debug
[sudo] password for myuser:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing ruby-debug:
 ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
 from extconf.rb:1

Gem files will remain installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/linecache-0.43 for inspection.
Results logged to /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/linecache-0.43/ext/gem_make.out
myuser@diglit-desktop:~$

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: rubygems (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.36-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-22-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Jun 9 14:15:12 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_AU.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: libgems-ruby

[Peter Goodall (pjgoodall)]

I found a similar problem described in: http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby/browse_thread/thread/d3ba3a487714bdb4?pli=1

I installed build-essential ruby-dev 4.2 libruby1.8-dbg and retried 'sudo gem install rub-debug' after this, the gem installed correctly.

I suggest that there are missing dependencies on the ruby-gems package.

Cheers....

[Paul van Tilburg (paulvt)]

Indeed, if extconf.rb is used, there should be a dependancy on ruby1.8-dev.

[Lucas Nussbaum (lucas)]

Not really: we can't guess which dependencies are required to build the gem you want to built.

ruby1.8-dev is already a Suggest for rubygems1.8, which sounds reasonable: if you want to install a non-native gem, you don't need it.

For me, the situation is fine, and it is the responsibility of the rubygems user to install the correct build dependencies. So marking as Invalid.

[Peter Goodall (pjgoodall)]

Thanks guys.

Very poor diagnostics for a beginner. I'd think that ruby-debug might be a core facility. Cant debug in eclipse and who knows what else.

--PG

[Lucas Nussbaum (lucas)]

That's unfortunately more a rubygems problem,because it should be more verbose about those problems.

Another fix to this specific issue would be to package ruby-debug...