Re: error of "no such file to load -- ferret_ext"

Thanks William Morgan! That was the tip I needed.

I had a stock install of Mac OS X Tiger, without developer tools 
installed. When I did the "gem install ferret" I ignored the message 
that gcc and make could not be found. RubyGems gave the message that 
ferret was installed despite the fact that the C extensions were not 
compiled and installed. So I got the error "no such file to load -- 
ferret_ext" when I tried to run ferret. Here's what I did to get ferret 
to work:

Found my Mac OS X Tiger install disk and opened the Xcode Tools folder. 
Clicked on the XcodeTools.mpkg. Started the install process and stopped 
before I clicked the "Upgrade" button. Instead clicked the "Customize" 
button and selected only "gcc 4.0" and the Software Development Kits 
"Mac OS X SDK" and "BSD SDK" (I'm not developing Mac apps so didn't want 
to crowd my disk with extra stuff I won't use). Then clicked "Upgrade." 
What you need gets installed as /usr/bin/gcc plus lots more in 
/usr/include. Now you can install ferret and it will compile the C 
extensions.

First I removed the broken ferret I installed earlier:
$ gem uninstall ferret

I checked that I had gcc:
$ which gcc
/usr/bin/gcc

If you can't find it, check your bash shell path environment with:
$ env
You should have something like 
"/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin"

I checked for the SDK libraries:
$ cd /usr/include
$ ls -lag
(should show lots of ".h" header files)

Then back to my development directory and ran:
$ sudo gem install ferret
Select which gem to install for your platform (powerpc-darwin7.9.0)
 1. ferret 0.10.13 (ruby)
...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ruby extconf.rb install ferret
creating Makefile
...
(lots of make cruft)
make install
...
make clean
Successfully installed ferret-0.10.13
Installing ri documentation for ferret-0.10.13...
Installing RDoc documentation for ferret-0.10.13...

You can test ferret with this Ruby code in a file "ferret_test.rb"
require 'rubygems'
require 'ferret'
include Ferret
puts "ferret works!"

Try it with:
$ ruby ferret_test.rb
ferret works!

I hope this helps someone else who might be in a similar situation, 
especially if they are googling for "no such file to load -- ferret_ext" 
or "Mac OS X gem install ferret" or even "installing gcc on mac os x".

-- Daniel


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