After zipping through a painless upgrade to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on both my Macs, I found myself banging my head against the wall trying to get my Rails + Postgres stack running again.
There is a lot of great information out there on how to get everything up to 64bit goodness, and I merrily began the uninstall/recompile/reinstall dance. What followed was an excruciating eight hours of trying to get Postgres to compile to 64bit, and the pg gem — or any Postgres adapter for that matter — to link against it.
Long story short: make sure you actually have a 64bit Mac. Let me say that again: make sure your Mac is actually running Snow Leopard in 64bit.
As embarrassing as this, at some point I finally realized that both my Macs used Core Duo chips, not Core 2 Duos – which makes my Snow Leopard a plain-old 32bit installation. Markus Winter on A hat full of sky has a lot of great information on the subject matter, as well as a program that shows you exactly what mode your system is running in, and why.
So, us 32bit cat owners still have to compile pg with
sudo env ARCHFLAGS='i386' gem install pg -- --with-pgsql-dir=/usr/local/pgsql
- just as we had to on 10.5 Leopard.
What I hope to have learned from this:
- Postgres is a fifteen year old project, crafted in ten thousands of man hours by countless programmers all smarter than me
- Next time it tells me it does not want to compile in 64bit, I’ll listen.
