Recently I've been unable to install any gems that require native extensions.
This included both rdiscount and wdm, the latter of which I need to run jekyll serve -w and automatically rebuild sites as needed on Windows.
The cause of the problem turned out to make no sense.
Active code page: 65001 generating rdiscount-x64-mingw32.def make: *** [rdiscount-x64-mingw32.def] Error 253
Perhaps it was the code page? To force the use of UTF-8 everywhere, mainly
so that Liquid doesn't break on Unicode characters when running Jekyll, I had
set up cmd.exe to chcp 65001 whenever opened by
creating the registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun REG_EXPAND_SZ
Disabled that, tried again, no change, so I put it back. Stuck for an hour
or two, I came back and tried running make manually on the gem
directory, and lo and behold, a window exclaimed that sh.exe has stopped
working.
Problem signature: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Application Name: sh.exe Fault Module Name: KERNELBASE.dll Exception Code: c00000fd
Confirming this, running the DevKit's sh crashes, while bash does not. I then took the opportunity to upgrade from Ruby 1.9.3
to 2.0.0, but sadly nothing changed still.
After some further investigation, it turns out that sh has a
stack overflow when being run through ansicon, a wrapper that processes ANSI escape sequences output from a
Win32 console. I had Console2 configured to run cmd.exe through
it, so that all programs were essentially wrapped, and any sequences output by
them would work as expected.
Simple solution: when running gem, open cmd.exe
directly. It's not like gem has coloured output or anything, so
you're not missing out.