Zod drinks Moonshine, becomes a Werewolf

One thing I neglected to mention previously, is the reason I am upgrading my slices. Because I am planning a new app, and all of my slices are pretty much single-purpose, I need to add a new one. For Fedora, the slicehost manager only offers version 8 “Werewolf” when creating new slices. The older Fedora distros have already been retired. (Fedora moves fast, with updates every six months.)

Before I added a new slice, I thought it prudent to get my older ones up to snuff, or at least to the same distro level…

I again looked to IonCannon for the magical rpm incantation (Why isn’t this just yum -y update—fedora, or something equally memorable?) but the process itself was painless. After the RPM update, yum said I needed 221 packages, at 218 MB, which somehow during the process became 431 transactions, but ran without any errors or further changes.

Well, except for Ruby Gems. Every Fedora upgrade somehow hoses my gems repository, reverting me back to 0.9.4. This would not be such a hassle, except that on memory-constrained servers (like my single purpose, 256 MB slices) gem can’t update itself because trying to do so leads to it running out of RAM and thrashing the swap such that it’s not possible for the upgrade to finish. The best solution I have found (in having to do this about six times now…) is as follows :

Download the source package :

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/35283/rubygems-1.1.1.tgz

Expand :

tar -xzf rubygems-1.1.1.tar

Install :

cd rubygems-1.1.1
sudo ruby setup.rb

After this, gem -v reports 1.1.1 and gem list—local is properly listing all of my required gems. Clearly, the problem is the yum update activates an older gem that somehow doesn’t destroy, but no longer recognizes, my previously installed ruby gems.

I hope the update to Sulphur (Fedora 9) is as easy as it was to go from Moonshine to Werewolf, and not the hassle of upgrading from Zod. Also, whatever these Fedora updates do to my system gems, needs to not happen any more!

UPDATE : Part of the problem is the gem path, when it reverts 0.9.4, the gem path is /usr/lib/ruby/gems, and when it’s later fixed, the gem path is /usr/lib64/ruby/gems, where my previous gems were stored. Es Muy Estupido!

Posted by Phi Sanders on Sunday, April 20, 2008