Irb command history problems under Ruby-1.8.4 and Mandriva 2006

A few months ago problems were reported with irb's
command history when Ruby-1.8.4 was compiled on a
Mandriva 2006 system:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/185233

I had exactly the same problem on my Mandiva 2006
system when upgrading to Ruby-1.8.4. I could find no
RPM, so I decided to compile myself. That's when the
fun started.

ruby --version showed 1.8.4 had been installed, but
using the up arrow in irb gave garbage (something like
"[[A").

Previous postings on this list tracked the problem
down to a missing readline-devel library, but I didn't
find any follow-up to indicate installing it actually
fixed the problem

My system had libreadline5 but not readline5-devel.
Using urpmi, I installed it using urpmi. (The output
from ./configure in 1.8.4 gave nothing to indicate
that the presence of libreadline was checked.) I then
ran make-clean, ./configure, make and make install.
Still, I had no command history in irb after launching
a new bash shell.

I've previously compiled a few packages from source
where rpm dependencies were missing. I just installed
the rpm's and was then able to successfully compile
and run the resulting binaries - without rebooting.

Nevertheless, I figured it couldn't hurt to reboot, so
I did. I immediately did make clean, ./configure, make
and make install. At this point the irb command
history worked perfectly.

Unfortunately, I was trying a lot things to try to get
this working - and I wasn't taking notes. So maybe one
of the things I tried but forgot actually did the
trick. The only things I can say are that the irb
command history didn't work until after I rebooted and
the only package I installed was libreadline5-devel.

cheers,
rich

P.S. Although I used urpme to uninstall the Ruby-1.8.2
distribution, I still found ruby files in /usr/bin
(for example, /usr/bin/ruby. Compiling the 1.8.4
source put binaries in /usr/local/bin. Maybe the
problem had something to do with this configuration.

···

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If the problem is similar to the above link, you likely have a bad installation. Check to make sure that ./configure found ncurses, readline, etc. The procedure was pretty well discussed in that thread.

The thing that they might have missed on the thread is that on systems like mandriva, you usually need the *-dev rpm to compile stuff. readline-dev, for example.
-Mat

···

On Jul 12, 2006, at 9:28 PM, richard apodaca wrote:

A few months ago problems were reported with irb's
command history when Ruby-1.8.4 was compiled on a
Mandriva 2006 system:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/185233

I had exactly the same problem on my Mandiva 2006
system when upgrading to Ruby-1.8.4. I could find no
RPM, so I decided to compile myself. That's when the
fun started.

[snip: wrestling with readline]