Not So Stupid

In case you have been sleeping in the same cave as Osama Bin Laden, Apple’s new OS X Leopard includes Ruby as a first-class language.

But Apple’s effort to make the language and all it’s extensions universal binaries can cause you some trouble when installing gems that require compilation.

If you’re installing on an Intel machine and see an error like “ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture ppc”, you probably are installing a gem that requires an external library, for which you only have the i386 version. This is a typical situation when installing mysql (as noted in the troubleshooting page of the MacOSForge wiki for Ruby).

After trying several variations, I came out with this solution:

If your installation command was

sudo gem install mysql

you need to run it as

sudo bash -c "ARCHFLAGS='-arch i386' gem install mysql"

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql

There you go… that should be all you need to install the mysql gem on Leopard against MySQL’s prepackaged binaries.

UPDATE: The troubleshooting page has been updated to include an alternative: using “sudo -s” to start a root shell. I still like my one-liner better :-)

UPDATE 2: Using env instead of bash is slightly cleaner.

UPDATE 3: MySQL still has some problems, because the library is pointing to the wrong direction. The quick solution is to create a link to the right place:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/mysql/lib /usr/local/bin/mysql/lib/mysql

This is an extraction of some things we’ve been using at StreetEasy for about two years now. Here’s the README:

Just like the traditional render :partial, embedded actions allow you to
refactor your views and extract presentation logic and templates into separate
files.

Unlike partials, embedded actions also let you define business logic to be
performed before the partial is included. That logic is encapsulated in the
already well understood metaphor of an action inside a controller.

So a simple call like

<%= embed_action :controller => “songs”, :action => “top10″ %>

lets you include an html fragment containing the top 10 songs into any of your
pages, regardless of which controller, action or view wants to do the including.

Additionally, embedded actions can provide caching of their results (allowing
for different parameters) just like page caching, but at the level of html
fragments. So your dynamic pages can still be rendered dynamically, but some of
the embedded actions can be cached (and expired) independently.

Just declare an action as ‘cacheable’ in a way similar to page caching,
by invoking “caches_embedded” with the name of the action to cache.

class TestController < ApplicationController
caches_embedded :user_list

def user_list
...
end
end

Cached fragments can be invalidated with calls to expires_embedded, but you must
remember to use the same set of parameters used to embed the cached action in
the first place.

The code is available at

http://dev.notso.net/svn/rails/plugins/embedded_actions/

and can be easily installed by running

script/plugin install http://dev.notso.net/svn/rails/plugins/embedded_actions/current

.

Enjoy, and please comment.

UPDATE: Version 1.1 has been released.