Ruby on OS X with GCC 4
Ruby has always had some weird funkiness on OS X with GCC 4 (at least on G4 PowerPCs from my personal experience). It seems to work fine most of the time, but once in a while you would get random errors/exceptions. In fact, I only ever seem the issue when running “gem update”. Wierd. The typical recommendation is for you to rebuild Ruby with GCC 3.3. Yeah! Fun!
I was previously running 1.8.6 that was demonstrating the issue. But before I tried to rebuild everything with GCC 3.3, I decided to check the Ruby website and see if there was a newer version. I hadn’t heard anything (and I’m usually pretty up to date), but I figured I might as well check. Turns out the latest version is still 1.8.6, but patch level 110, dated 2007-9-23. This is 6 months after the release of 1.8.6. Looking at the ChangeLog (I could only find it in the tarball), there are many many bug fixes. I rebuilt it and installed it and I am now happily updating my gems without any issues.
I might just be lucky this time in avoiding the Heisenbug, but at the least it’s a newer version that has fixed a bunch of other bugs. At what point would it be called 1.8.7?