RubyGems – Stickler

Stickler – Manage gem repositories

http://copiousfreetime.rubyforge.org/stickler

Ruby 1.8.6 and Rubygems 1.0.1 – “can’t activate xxx, already activated yyy’

Using ruby 1.8.6 and rubygems 1.0.1

If you get the error “can’t activate xxx, already activated yyy”, it can be hard to find the problem.

This version of custom_require.rb has some debug information that prints to the console to make this job easier.

This file updates the file of the same name in the directory

$RUBY_LIB_INSTALL_DIR/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb

where $RUBY_LIB_INSTALL_DIR is the base directory where internal Ruby libraries are stored for your particular installation. This is almost always either /usr/lib/ruby or /usr/local/lib/ruby.

In addition, in the following in the file:

$RUBY_LIB_INSTALL_DIR/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb

Add an additional line so the code starting near line 12 looks like this fragment

  module Gem
    class LoadError < ::LoadError
      attr_accessor :name, :version_requirement
    end

    DEBUG_ME = true unless defined?(Gem::DEBUG_ME)
  end

Then, insert a statement similar to this at the start of the method ‘activate’ (near line 300).

puts "rubylib.rubygems activate gem #{gem.inspect} autorequire #{autorequire.inspect} version_requirements #{version_requirements.inspect}" if Gem::DEBUG_ME

Debugging RubyGems dependencies

Rubygems overrides the standard Ruby ‘require’ statement.  If you need to see what RubyGems is actually doing, in the file

.../lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb

add code similar to the following:

def require(path) # :doc: (original code)

    if ENV['RUBYGEM_DEBUG'] and ENV['RUBYGEM_DEBUG'] == 'true'
      puts "\ngem rubygems 1.3.4 require called from"
      1.upto(3) do |idx|
        puts caller[idx,1]
      end
      puts "gem rubygems 1.3.4 require about to require \"#{path}\""
    end

gem_original_require path # (original code)

Then create aliases similar to the following to turn ‘require’ debugging on and off.

alias rubygem_debug_on='export RUBYGEM_DEBUG=true'
alias rubygem_debug_off='export RUBYGEM_DEBUG=false'

That’s it!

Installing a second copy of Ruby and Rubygems

If you want to install a second suite of Ruby, Rubygems and gems, and allow the second suite to be used on demand you can follow something similar to the following manual procedure.

Create the base for a new directory structure

sudo mkdir /opt/ruby186

Install the basics, forcing them into the new structure

(this assumes you have the appropriate distributions unpacked in some build directory)

cd readline-5.2
make clean
 ./configure --prefix=/opt/ruby186
make
sudo make install

cd ../ruby-1.8.6-p111
make clean
./configure --prefix=/opt/ruby186 --disable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/opt/ruby186 --enable-shared
make
sudo make install

cd ../rubygems-1.3.4
export PATH=/opt/ruby186/bin:${PATH} # VITAL
sudo ruby setup.rb

Make an alias to set your PATH on demand

alias rubyother='export PATH=/opt/ruby186/bin:${PATH}'

Put the alias into one of your shell startup files – e.g. ~/.bashrc

When you need to switch to this version of Ruby, open up a new terminal window, type ‘rubyother’ and you’re using the second version of Ruby. When you close the window, these settings disappear – which is what you want.