I’ve been having trouble with edge Rails on Solaris for the past few days, and I finally decided to figure out what the problem actually was. It all boiled down to this method here (from activesupport/lib/active_support/inflector.rb#275):

It would appear that the C library implementation of iconv(3) on my build of OpenSolaris (Nevada build 99) doesn’t actually support transliteration, so this code was raising an exception:

Iconv::InvalidEncoding: invalid encoding ("ascii//translit//IGNORE", "utf-8")

every time the inflector was required (which was every time Rails was loaded in any way). That sucked somewhat because it meant I couldn’t deploy an application I was working on!

It took me a while to realise that the C library implementation of iconv here was somewhat lacking (I assumed everybody just used GNU iconv these days). Turns out the solution is to install the SUNWgnu-libiconv package on Nevada:

bash-3.2$ pfexec pkg install SUNWgnu-libiconv

That’ll install the appropriate libraries but, as you can see, all is still not well:

bash-3.2$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'iconv'
=> true
irb(main):004:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii//translit//IGNORE', 'utf-8', "fôôø").to_s
Iconv::InvalidEncoding: invalid encoding ("ascii//translit//IGNORE", "utf-8")
     from (irb):4:in `iconv'
     from (irb):4
     from :0

You also must force the GNU version of the library to preload so that it takes over from the built-in implementation of iconv(3):

bash-3.2$ LD_PRELOAD="/usr/gnu/lib/preloadable_libiconv.so" irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'iconv'
=> true
irb(main):004:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii//translit//IGNORE', 'utf-8', "fôôø").to_s
=> "f^oo^o"

That’s all well and good for individual sessions of irb(1) but that’s going to be somewhat cumbersome to roll into all of our Rails deployments. I’m still trying to find a workable solution to apply this “globally”. Here’s what I’ve tried so far, and failed to make work:

• Find a sensible global place to set LD_PRELOAD so that every application will catch it. This seems somewhat scattergun and a bit dangerous.

• Replace the ruby binary with a shell script that sets LD_PRELOAD then calls the real Ruby binary. This sorta worked, but it breaks every she-bang-ed script because #!/path/to/ruby is no longer an ELF binary, but a shell script. Chances are this would be a winning strategy if I could figure out how to code it in C.

• Relinking the iconv.so Ruby library to add a reference to libgnuiconv.so. This was a total stab in the dark because I don’t even know if you can relink dynamic libraries after the fact.

Needless to say, none of these strategies worked, so I think I’m back to recompiling Ruby from source. Yee ha. Perhaps now is a good time to try out Ruby Enterprise Edition, see what happens…