How to install buildr on Ubuntu Intrepid

If there is one thing that is more annoying than the proliferation of tools meant to replace CVS, it is the proliferation of tool meant to replace make. Because unlike the former, which are a clear step forward, the latter are generally a horrible mess. The example for today: buildr.

The failing official way

On the first examination of the situation, it looked like it would be a piece of cake: There is a detailed description on how to build buildr on ubuntu on the buildr site. The only problem with this is that it is outdated and doesn't really work if you try to install on Intrepid. One point is that you no longer have to build gem from source, intrepid already comes with the required version 1.2.0. The next problem is that the command to install buildr doesn' work, if you follow the instruction, the installation fails with: If you do a quick sudo apt-get install rake, you get the correct version of rake, but trying to build buildr still fails with the same

Some way that at least builds something

So I had to install rake using gem. But just saying doesn't buy you anything, because this will give you rake 0.8.3 and gem will not build buildr unless the version of rake is exactly 0.8.1.

Of course, all of this should not be necessary, because gem claims to be another of these super intelligent tools that automatically resolve your dependencies for you. But, like most programs in this class, it just doesn't work and you have to install all the dependencies of buildr in the exact obsolete versions required by buildr by hand.

So it's

and so on, you get the drill. The whole list of required steps is: And then finally the big moment: Wait... WHAT? It forces you to downgrade rake from 0.8.3 to 0.8.1, only to upgrade to 0.8.3 as part of the build process? You expect me to trust your "outstanding dependency management" if you can't even boostrap your own code without stuff like that?

As an aside, when I was trying to see if another version of buildr would work better, I gave the exact version -v 1.3.2 to gem, and now it resolved the dependencies. Maybe specifying the version would also work for buildr 1.3.3, but I did not test this.

Getting buildr to work

And the reward for it all? This: So off to google we go, looking for buildr and segfault, and find that the official position of the buildr team seems to be we don't guarantee anything if you use JDK6. And, indeed, the segfaults vanish if I set JAVA_HOME to /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.16/.

Half a day gone just to use "something that's simple and intuitive to use".