I’ve started doing some Ruby development. The commonly used platform for the development team(s) tends to be one of OS X, Ubuntu, or Mint. I do not fall in to that category.

Getting RVM to install Ruby under Archlinux was fraught with issues. Most of them were trivial and just a matter of getting the right dependencies installed. There was, though, one issue that was particularly misleading. When trying to rvm install 2.1.1, I received this error:

Error running '__rvm_make -j2',
showing last 15 lines of /home/sbarker/.rvm/log/1394556125_ruby-2.1.1/make.log
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/sbarker/.rvm/src/ruby-2.1.1/ext/readline'
exts.mk:199: recipe for target 'ext/readline/all' failed
make[1]: *** [ext/readline/all] Error 2
make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
compiling ossl_x509crl.c
compiling ossl_digest.c
compiling ossl_pkey_rsa.c
compiling ossl_engine.c
compiling ossl_ssl.c
installing default openssl libraries
linking shared-object openssl.so
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/sbarker/.rvm/src/ruby-2.1.1/ext/openssl'
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/sbarker/.rvm/src/ruby-2.1.1'
uncommon.mk:180: recipe for target 'build-ext' failed
make: *** [build-ext] Error 2
There has been an error while running make. Halting the installation.

A similar-ish error occurred when trying to install Ruby 2.0.0.

Initially this looked to be an error with OpenSSL dependencies. I spent longer than I would care to admit going down that road, trying several different options, including rvm autolibs enable, all to no avail. I finally gave up, and in admitting defeat, spun up an Ubuntu VM. And behold, the same error occurred. It wasn’t an OS issue.

Back to the drawing board, I dove in to ~/.rvm/src/ruby/2.1.1 to ./configure and make the package by hand to see if I could discover anything new. As it turns out, seeing the full context around the error pointed me in the right direction.

The first bit of the error reported by RVM is the key.

Error running '__rvm_make -j2',
showing last 15 lines of /home/sbarker/.rvm/log/1394556125_ruby-2.1.1/make.log
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/sbarker/.rvm/src/ruby-2.1.1/ext/readline'
exts.mk:199: recipe for target 'ext/readline/all' failed
make[1]: *** [ext/readline/all] Error 2
make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

The issue lies with readline and not with openssl dependencies. RVM’s autolibs setting obviously didn’t trigger, since readline was present. I told RVM to install its own readline with rvm pkg install readline. When that finished building, I attempted to install Ruby 2.1.1 again with rvm install 2.1.1 -C --with-readline-dir=$HOME/.rvm/usr. The result, great success. RVM happily downloaded, built, and installed 2.1.1 for me. I repeated this for 2.0.0 and also had great success. 1.9.3 was never an issue, and that continued to be not an issue.