ruby-debug Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers

Question

My Rails is 3.2.1.4, Ruby is 1.9.3p448.

I got an error when I install ruby-debug:

Building native extensions.          


        

Answer 1

My mkmf.log showed that gcc (4.8.2 I think) didn't like a specific argument that was being used by atomic on

$ gem install atomic

So I had a very similar situation. The answer for me was to upgrade gcc/gcc-libs and lib tool.

I use Arch linux, and only Arch linux. The proper way to do this is to run

$ sudo pacman -Syu

which upgrades all system packages.

I installed Rails and hadn't run a system update since, which is where the issue came from. In most other *nix distros, you would update to the latest version of these packages by name, i.e. with apt, it would be something along the lines of

$ sudo apt-get update

followed by

$ sudo apt-get upgrade {package-name}