Errors installing some gems on Snow Leopard - libxml2

Question

After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I found that installing some gems no longer worked, including webrat, mechanize etc. Each time I get this error:

checking f         


        

Answer 1

The gems you are trying to install require libxml2. If you're comfortable installing from source, install libxml2.

You may run into dependency issues where libxml2 depends on a bunch of other packages that you'll need to build and install manually. That's one reason why macports ends up being useful.