Fixing Rake in Ruby 1.9.2

When a task in Rake fails, Rake is supposed to simply tell me it failed and then tell me to use the --trace option if I want to know more. However, tonight it was acting as though I always called it with --trace:

┌─[pearson@Bragi] - [~/temp] - [Sun Oct 24, 11:41]
└─[$]> cat Rakefile 
task :foo do
	fail
end
┌─[pearson@Bragi] - [~/temp] - [Sun Oct 24, 11:43]
└─[$]> /usr/bin/rake foo
(in /home/pearson/temp)
rake aborted!

/home/pearson/temp/Rakefile:2:in `block in <top (required)>'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:634:in `call'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:634:in `block in execute'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:629:in `each'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:629:in `execute'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:595:in `block in invoke_with_call_chain'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/monitor.rb:201:in `mon_synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:588:in `invoke_with_call_chain'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:581:in `invoke'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2041:in `invoke_task'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2019:in `block (2 levels) in top_level'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2019:in `each'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2019:in `block in top_level'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2058:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2013:in `top_level'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1992:in `run'
/usr/bin/rake:31:in `<main>'

I tried doing the reverse of the make-Rake-always-trace trick, but that didn’t seem to have any effect.

I thought about digging through Rake’s source to see what was happening, but that was far more work than I wanted to do, and could do at this point in time.

So, instead, I had a full write-up to StackOverflow, and moments from posting, noticed that the include path was using 1.9.1, even though I had Ruby 1.9.2 installed. Then I remembered that Ruby 1.9.2 did some weird stuff with gems.

Eventually, I tried re-installing rake, from gem, rather than the version included in 1.9.2. This lead me to a different error:

┌─[pearson@Bragi] - [~/temp] - [Sun Oct 24, 11:58]
└─[$]> rake foo
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:340:in `bin_path': can't find executable rake for rake-0.8.7 (Gem::Exception)
	from /usr/bin/rake:19:in `<main>'

and then the terrifying advice from J. Random Blogger:

Apparently 1.9.2 comes with a version of rake internally, but is unable to find it for some reason relating to the rake.gemspec file. Remove the file to fix this issue.

And you know what? It fixed it. I kept a backup just in case, but damn, that’s sketchy. Ruby on my system is starting to feel like the CPAN mess I have to deal with at work - it’s gotten to the point that anytime I touch something vaguely related to Perl in yum, our software breaks, and I spend several hours in quality time with the CPAN shell downgrading and reinstalling packages.