Ruby config options fail

Sunday, January 27, 2019 

Ruby is a horrible nightmare language, like almost all modern languages. They try to be so clever and modular, but end up making a maintenance hassle as various modules come and go, dependencies break, and the developer community moves on to the next shiny thing that claims to be the best thing to happen to programming since C.

Oh well.

If you get a bunch of "invalid option: --no-rdoc" errors, it is because sometime in the last few years --no-rdoc and --no-ri were depreciated in favor of --no-document. And, apparently, just recently builds started barfing on the deprecated errors. Building universally with these options is a pretty standard thing as it vastly improves build time and the rdoc system is a whole big kettle of annoying weirdness you just don’t need to wade through.

Now Ruby, being oh-so-clever and friendly, has all sorts of places where these might be set universally or semi-universally. The references will tell you about /.gemrc and /etc/gemrc, but only by doing a grep -FrHIis 'no-rdoc' * at / did I find these sneaky little bastards:

basejail/usr/ports/sysutils/vagrant/Makefile:RUBYGEM_ARGS=      --no-ri --no-rdoc -l --no-update-sources \
basejail/usr/ports/Mk/Uses/gem.mk:RUBYGEM_ARGS+= --no-rdoc --no-ri
basejail/usr/ports/devel/ruby-gems/Makefile:DOCS_VARS_OFF= RUBY_SETUP_OPTIONS+="--no-ri --no-rdoc"
basejail/usr/ports/devel/rubygem-io-like/Makefile:DOCS_VARS_OFF= RUBYGEM_ARGS+=--no-rdoc

After converting those to the “new” “better” “shiny” version of the config option string did my gems build.

Posted at 06:33:18 GMT-0700

Category: Technology