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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Mountain Lion and Nokogiri
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Today was the day I attempted the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Upgrading all the way from Snow Leopard (long story). The tedious first step is making sure I have backups, usually multiple backups, in addition to the ones I keep by default. Computers hate me, so I’ve learned to be paranoid.
My first serious hitch was with Aperture. I’d bought a download ages ago, when the route was to download a trial version and buy a product key. I still have the key, but there’s no place to download the trial version from. Fortunately there was a very helpful man on Apple’s telephone support who solved that one. +1 to him for being so helpful, but -2 for Apple for making it hard in the first place.
My more serious trouble was with Nokogiri, ruby’s XML processing library. Since almost all my website is XML transformed to HTML via Nokogiri and Ruby, this is rather crucial to me. But I had no end of trouble finding some way to get Nokogiri to install and work. Looking out on the web there are several pages of advice, with different combinations of animals to sacrifice in various orders.
In the end I got it working, but not in such a way that I have a confident trail for others to follow. I installed XCode command line tools, later the full XCode itself (don’t know if that was a factor). I initially used homebrew for supporting libraries but without success. I tried using rvm, but it failed (and I backed it out). In the end I installed libxml2 and libxslt using Macports and got it all working on the installed ruby 1.8.7.
I can only hope that this is just early days of Mountain Lion, but the situation is really too messy. It’s very troubling that the default install of ruby is still the elderly 1.8.7. I do need to share my scripts from time to time with others who are not active rubyists. It would be nice if there was a simpler installation process for them than my worry-ridden afternoon. I find myself pining for the days of the one-click windows install.
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