I did a write up awhile back on rvm and really enjoy it’s feature set. Yesterday, I tried to rvm install ruby 1.8.7 on a new machine I’m using that runs ruby 1.9.1 as the system ruby. I did my normal thing:

$ rvm install 1.8.7

And rvm spit this error out after trying to compile:

Error running 'make ', please check
/home/blake/.rvm/log/ruby-1.8.7-p249/make*.log
There has been an error while running make. Aborting the installation.

Hrm, interesting… Let’s take a look at the make.log:

ossl_pkcs7.c: At top level:
ossl_pkcs7.c:546:14: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
ossl_pkcs7.c: In function ‘ossl_pkcs7_set_certificates’:
ossl_pkcs7.c:584:11: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
ossl_pkcs7.c: In function ‘ossl_pkcs7_get_certificates’:
ossl_pkcs7.c:594:5: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘ossl_x509_sk2ary’ makes pointer from integer without a cast
ossl.h:120:7: note: expected ‘struct stack_st_X509 *’ but argument is of type ‘int’
ossl_pkcs7.c: In function ‘ossl_pkcs7_set_crls’:
ossl_pkcs7.c:624:10: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
ossl_pkcs7.c: In function ‘ossl_pkcs7_get_crls’:
ossl_pkcs7.c:634:5: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘ossl_x509crl_sk2ary’ makes pointer from integer without a cast
ossl.h:121:7: note: expected ‘struct stack_st_X509_CRL *’ but argument is of type ‘int’
make[1]: *** [ossl_pkcs7.o] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 1

Oh man, where to begin right? After doing a bit of poking around, I discovered that the issue is with OpenSSL. My system install is using a version that is having some compatability issues with compiling ruby.

After finding this thread and this solution, here’s the recipe I followed to get it to work:

$ rvm package install openssl
$ rvm remove 1.8.7
$ rvm install 1.8.7 -C --with-openssl-dir=$HOME/.rvm/usr

What am I doing? I’m downloading a working version of OpenSSL, compiling it and sticking it inside my rvm prefix. Then I clean out the provious installation attempt to make sure things are in order before re-compiling. When I tell rvm to install ruby, I pass it in the option of using the version of ssl that rvm compiled instead of the system one. Now everything is working again, sweet! Back to cutting those gems.