Broken memcached gem/libmemchached port on OS X

Update (2009/04/22):
This post was originally only targeted at OS X but I have since noticed Ubuntu also having this same issue. Jump to my additional instructions for Ubuntu.

Recipe for disaster:

1. Use MacPorts for your package management
2. Use the ruby memcached gem
3. Use the libmemcached port as a dependency on the gem above
4. Upgrade your ports

Synopses
I upgraded all my ports on my MBP recently and one of the libs that was upgraded in the process was libmemcached (upgraded from v0.25 to v0.26). Unfortunately this has broken my access to memcached on my system (the script dies when trying to connect).

Not knowing what the problem may be I also upgraded my gem to v0.14 which then could not build. A quick search for the issue found this entry on the memcached discussion forum.

How now brown cow?
Evan Weaver, the maintainer of the memcached project, mentioned that libmemcached v0.26 lacks some critical patch and suggested people may have to wait for v0.27 to rectify things.

For those who cannot wait and have inconsistent, broken systems, Evan goes on to mention that you should currently use the libmemcached lib and memcached gem pair from here.

Here he also provides a convenient compatibility matrix so you can see how to align the different versions of libmemcached and the memcached gem.

Fix
Unfortunately this messes with things because libmemcached now needs to be installed as a source package in a system managed with MacPorts.

Yuck!

Unfortunately the choices are limited as the versions of libmemcached that ships as a port are either v0.26 (the latest, but broken for our purposes) or v0.25 (which aligns with the older v0.13 of the memcached gem).

First off remove any libmemcached ports you may have installed:

$ sudo port uninstall libmemcached

Download the libmemcached source archive, extract, build and install it:

ibm-99tvvxc:msp charl$ cd /var/tmp/
$ wget http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/libmemcached-0.25.14.tar.gz
--2009-02-24 10:50:40--  http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/libmemcached-0.25.14.tar.gz
Resolving blog.evanweaver.com... 208.78.102.192
Connecting to blog.evanweaver.com|208.78.102.192|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 428047 (418K) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: `libmemcached-0.25.14.tar.gz'

100%[==========================================================>] 428,047      135K/s   in 3.1s 

2009-02-24 10:50:49 (135 KB/s) - `libmemcached-0.25.14.tar.gz' saved [428047/428047]

$ tar zxvf libmemcached-0.25.14.tar.gz
libmemcached-0.25.14/
[...]
$ cd libmemcached-0.25.14
$ ./configure
checking build system type... i386-apple-darwin9.6.0
checking host system type... i386-apple-darwin9.6.0
checking target system type... i386-apple-darwin9.6.0
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
[...]
$ make
Making all in docs
/usr/bin/pod2man -c "libmemcached" -r "" -s 3 libmemcached.pod > libmemcached.3
/usr/bin/pod2man -c "libmemcached" -r "" -s 3 libmemcached_examples.pod > libmemcached_examples.3
[...]
$ sudo make install
Password:
Making install in docs
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'.
test -z "/usr/local/share/man/man1" || ../config/install-sh -c -d "/usr/local/share/man/man1"
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 './memcat.1' '/usr/local/share/man/man1/memcat.1'
[...]

You may want to keep the source directory around so that you can easily uninstall (run sudo make uninstall in the source directory) the source installation later when the relevant aligned packaged versions are available for installation.

The final step is to install the gem:

$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install -r -V memcached --no-rdoc --no-ri
GET 200 OK: http://gems.rubyforge.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz
GET 200 OK: http://gems.github.com/latest_specs.4.8.gz
connection reset after 2 requests, retrying
GET 200 OK: http://gems.rubyforge.org/quick/Marshal.4.8/memcached-0.14.gemspec.rz
Installing gem memcached-0.14
/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/memcached-0.14/BENCHMARKS
/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/memcached-0.14/CHANGELOG
[...]
Successfully installed memcached-0.14
1 gem installed

Success!

We now have libmemcached v0.25.14 and the memcached v0.14 gem installed and we can go on with our lives.