I ran into a problem that kept me busy over the weekend. It seems that rmagick (which is requires for the awesome sparklines project will compile and run on Snow Leopard, however it has a critical bug when trying to use it. The script/server process will crash with a “Trace/BPT trap” error. The logs won’t say anything and the hell if anything is going to appear on the browser. WTF.

Here’s my stack on my Mac: (do not use this stack, this is just for informational purposes only)

• ruby19 installed via macports: sudo install ruby19
• regular rubygems installed
• ImageMagick 6.6.0-0 installed via macports
• A bunch of github gems installed but not firing on the controller method that crashes</p>

So I started over on a CentOS 5.4 VM just to try out my stack and it worked. Except, I used ruby 1.8.7 compiled via source. It’s a really lengthy process and it’ll be part of my README if I ever get this project done. On CentOS you have to compile and install ImageMagick yourself because yum has a really old version. There’s a ton of devel dependencies too. If anyone needs the instructions, leave a comment and I’ll copy/paste from my README.

So I suspected that ruby 1.9 was causing problems my mac laptop and that turned out to be true. I did a sudo port uninstall ruby19 and then a sudo port install ruby. I had to reinstall all the gems again but it wasn’t too bad. If port gives you a ln error, just exit your shell and open a new one.

So RMagick, ImageMagick and ruby 1.9 do not play together.