I’ve been wanting to try Node.js for some time and finally got around to it last night. I’ve had all sorts of little problems after upgrading to OS X Lion and ran into one when compiling Node.js. I was following the howto guide on the Node wiki page and received an error when running ./configure. The error stated:

/Users/db/_dev/nodejs/wscript:232: error: could not configure a cxx compiler!

which looked like this:

It turns out that after upgrading to OS X Lion that my g++ and c++ compilers were no longer working. Instead of digging into the root cause I decided to upgrade to Xcode 4.1.1 from the Mac App Store. Unfortunately, this was a 3.1 GB download so I had to wait a bit before I could continue with my Node.js install.

After Xcode was downloaded the App Store showed that it was installed as you can see here:

But unfortunately that wasn’t the case. The file had only been downloaded and not installed. I had to use Spotlight to locate the “Install Xcode” binary:

After installing Xcode 4.1 I was finally able to configure and make Node.js. Now on to bigger and better things. I hope this helps those who run into the same problem of installing Node.js on OS X Lion.

This morning I was trying to install Gnuplot from source because I wanted generate some graphs for ApacheBench. I’m currently benchmarking one of our Rails applications using Nginx w/ Mongrels against Phusion Passenger (Nginx flavor). When “make”ing Gnuplot I received the following error:

Undefined symbols:
“_rl_ding”, referenced from:
_alert in mouse.o
“_rl_complete_with_tilde_expansion”, referenced from:
_main in plot.o
“_history_list”, referenced from:
_write_history_list in history.o
“_rl_reset_after_signal”, referenced from:
_main in plot.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [gnuplot] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

After reading a comment here I found out that the -–with-readline=builtin option needs to be include when configuring Gnuplot. So you should run the following before “make”ing:

./configure -–with-readline=builtin

That got me going and hopefully it will do the same for you!

I’m posting way too much about SVN these days, but these are mainly for my personal recollection. Hopefully you’ll find them useful too. Here’s the scenario: you’re working on a branch and you want to merge a single commit from trunk into the branch. The first thing you need to do is find the revision number that you want to merge. Let’s say it’s 11259. Your SVN merge command will look like this:

svn merge -r 11258:11259 –dry-run https://myrepo.com/trunk

Notice the “–dry-run” parameter. This will display a list of files impacted, but won’t actually make the change. When you’re ready for primetime just remove the –dry-run param:

svn merge -r 11258:11259 https://myrepo.com/trunk