Ruby 1.8.2 on Ubuntu 5.04

I decided to simply rebuild Breezy’s ruby1.8 (1.8.2-9) for Hoary.

1. Add Breezy’s repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list

2. Pin Breezy to priority 1, to apt won’t upgrade the whole system – put this in /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: * Pin: release breezy Pin-Priority: 1

1. Install the build-essential package.

2. Go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/breezy/source/ruby1.8 and install Hoary’s versions of all of the packages marked as build-depends (I vaguely remember that when I wanted to go the automagic route of “sudo apt-get build-dep ruby1.8” apt wanted to pull Breezy’s version of the build-depends).

3. Make a directory and do an “apt-get source ruby1.8” (without a sudo) inside it.

4. “cd ruby1.8-1.8.2”.

5. “fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage”.

6. …wait…

7. You should have some fresh *.deb packages in the parent directory of ruby1.8-1.8.2. Go there and do a “sudo dpkg -i libruby1.8_1.8.2-9_i386.deb ruby1.8_1.8.2-9_i386.deb”.

Note: This is a minimalistic approach that gives you ruby1.8. If you use other Ruby packages/tools (IRB, RI, etc.) you might backport them as well (some of them are built from the ruby1.8 source package and wait for you already).

To follow-up: rails 0.12.1-1 in Ubuntu do not differ one bit from rails 0.12.1-1 in Debian testing, so I decided to simply grab rails 0.13.1-1’s .deb from Debian unstable and dpkg -i it.

“dpkg-deb -f rails_0.13.1-1_all.deb” shows the package dependencies; I satisfied some from the plethora of packages that came out of backporting rails1.8, some from Breezy (libredcloth-ruby1.8, the dummy rdoc and ruby) and some simply from Hoary (rake, libdbi-ruby1.8 / libpgsql-ruby1.8).

Note: libmysql-ruby1.8’s changelog shows that Breezy’s 2.4.5-6.1 contains some RC bugfix, but is recompiled against newer dependencies. If Hoary’

[sorry, Firefox crashed on me]

If Hoary’s libmysql-ruby1.8 2.4.5-6 doesn’t work, one might need to recompile Breezy’s libmysql-ruby1.8 2.4.5-6.1 (the way I recompiled ruby1.8 in the beginning).

Great to hear it. :)

As an aside – I guess I’m going to use RubyGems sooner or later anyway. As I guess it’s not too good to mix and match gems and APT packages, I’ll stay with only Ruby from packages, uninstall the rails package, get the RubyGems sources, checkinstall -D them and get everything else through gems.

From what I read so far, checkinstall -D does the same thing as make install, but tracks the changes to the system and actually turns the source-based RubyGems installation into a .deb package (an “unkosher” one, but it’s still better than “classic” make install).

Any thoughts on this route? :)

To tell the truth, I didn’t test it (yet), but my bet would be on checkinstalling RubyGems into /opt.

I’ll look at sourceinstall, thanks for the link! So far they definitely get extra points for using wesnoth as the screenshot example. ;)

Hi zeroK,

I was wondering wether you are also using rubygem? Because installing ruby with a prefix didn't work for me as soon as I had to sudo ruby stuff or sudo gem install stuff. Because sudo is compiled --with-secure-path on Ubuntu, there is no way to add the path for sudo. I tried adding links in /usr/local/bin, but it seems that messed up other stuff because of the many other ruby packages I had installed with apt (that were living in a different path), so I got other error messages. I finally installed ruby without a prefix, but with checkinstall - less trouble. ;)

I have been experimenting with Ruby and came across this problem now when I wanted to get started with Rails. For reference, in case someone else has the same problem, there is an updated Ruby in hoary-backports:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-backports main universe