Question

OS: Mac OS X 10.8.2
XCode: Latest with command line tools installed (version 4.6)
Rails: version 3.2.3

I was trying to generate the routes for a project I am working on (been doing that on regular basis), when I got an error message, with a recommendation that I do bundle install and bundle exec. I did, and this time around, the process broke off while compiling the JSON Gem (version 1.7.7).

Doing some research on StackOverflow, the recommendation was to update the XCode’s command line tools, and I did, but that did not solve the problem.

I tried installing the JSON version 1.7.7 separately, and it failed, telling me to look for the error log in:

~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/json-1.7.7/ext/json/ext/generator/gem_make.out

Which reads:

/Users/mine/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p125/bin/ruby extconf.rb
creating Makefile

make
compiling generator.c
make: /usr/bin/gcc-4.2: No such file or directory
make: *** [generator.o] Error 1

I looked for /usr/bin/gcc-4.2, and indeed, it’s not there. But, when I do:

ls -l /usr/bin/gcc

Here’s what I get:

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  12 Feb 14 15:49 /usr/bin/gcc -> llvm-gcc-4.2

How do I fix this problem?

Answer 1

I think the problem is that when you install the Xcode command line tools, gcc is sym-linked to llvm, and llvm can’t always compile Ruby and gems correctly.

If you install autoconf, automake, and gcc directly (or through something like Homebrew), you should be able to fix the compiler errors.