How to get Readline support in IRB using RVM on Ubuntu 11.10

Question

I have tried everything I can think of to get this to work, to no avail so here I am requesting suggestions on how to debug.

Firstly, runnning Ubuntu 11.10

I

Answer 1

For me, it just worked out of the box with the latest verison of rvm. My steps

bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer )

according to rvm requirements:

apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion

rvm install 1.9.3

rvm

Answer 2

I struggled with this same issue with Ubuntu 11.10.

In my case readline would seemingly compile properly if I used the following:

$ rvm --skip-autoreconf pkg install readline

as outlined at the bottom of http://beginrescueend.com/packages/readline/

However, when I invoked irb, I would get the normal error "Unable to require readline"

Finally, based on Shane's command line, I invoked the following:

$ rvm install 1.9.3 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_usr_path --with-iconv-dir=$rvm_usr_path --with-zlib-dir=$rvm_usr_path --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_usr_path

rather than the command mentioned at http://beginrescueend.com/packages/readline/

$ rvm install 1.9.2 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr

In my case version 1.9.3 was what I wanted. And finally irb came up with a functioning readline.

Thanks to everyone here for pointing me in the right direction.

Answer 3

I had the same issue but I'm on 11.04 and from reading the link you gave https://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/issues/553 and from the info in peplins comment there I removed the autoreconf call that was added here
https://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/commit/94c301d and now readline compiles without any errors. I added back in the autoreconf call after I had compiled readline before installing ruby again.

So this is how I got it work:

edit ~/.rvm/scripts/functions/pkg and delete the following:

if [[ "${rvm_skip_autoreconf_flag:-0}" == 0 ]] &&
  which autoreconf >/dev/null 2>&1 &&
  which libtoolize >/dev/null 2>&1 &&
  [[ -f configure.ac || -f configure.in ]]
then
__rvm_run "$package/autoreconf" \
  "autoreconf -is --force" \
  "Prepare $package in $rvm_src_path/$package-$version."
fi

Compile readline and remove ruby (I used the ree_dependencies command but I'm not sure this is necessary):

rvm pkg install ree_dependencies
rvm remove 1.9.2

undo your deletion to ~/.rvm/scripts/functions/pkg
I then installed 1.9.2 with this command (again it's from the ree install which I'm not sure is necessary but this is what I used)

rvm install 1.9.2 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_usr_path --with-iconv-dir=$rvm_usr_path --with-zlib-dir=$rvm_usr_path --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_usr_path

and now all appears to work as it should, hope that helps someone.

Answer 4

This solved my problem for rvm with Ruby 1.9.3

gem install rb-readline

Answer 5

Unfortunately none of these worked for me. I ended up using the Quick Fix from http://beginrescueend.com/packages/readline/

That solved my problem.

Answer 6

If you are using Bundler then the following might help:

echo "gem 'rb-readline'" >> Gemfile
bundle install