merb application (chef-server) fails to start

[Greg Althaus]

In trying to get the chef-server running precise, it seems that merb-core and rubygems don't interact well.

I was using the chef-server from Opscode for oneiric. I don't believe it is limited to that though.

The chef-webserver fails to start because of an error merb-core about Gem.activate not existing. In researching and playing with it, It seems that line 142 of /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/merb-core/core_ext/kernel.rb has an example of the error. This causes chef-server to not run.

It appears that merb-core is at 1.0.1 or so and that version has not been updated to work with the rubygems 1.8.15 that is in precise.
On Oneiric, the rubygems update is not as far and only warnings are generated and not failures.

I'm not sure what the ramifications of updating merb-core are to the rest of the packages.

The quick hack for this is to change:
Gem.activate(dep)
to:
dep.to_spec.activate

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.