That’s a lot of hoops to jump through

One of the things I’ve been learning in my spare time is the Ruby programming language. Mac OS X comes with a fairly old version installed, and I wanted to put the latest version on my Mac. Unfortunately, Ruby has thoroughly embraced the open-source ethos: “we hate our users and want them to suffer.” It ended up taking many, many hours spread out over a period of months to finally get Ruby 1.9.3 installed.

Here’s the trick to making it install with RVM:

curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-6.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf readline-6.2.tar.gz
cd readline-6.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
cd shlib
sed -e 's/-dynamic/-dynamiclib/' Makefile > Makefile.good
mv Makefile.good Makefile
cd ..
make
sudo make install
cd ..
rvm install 1.9.3 -C --with-readline-dir=/usr/local/