Building ruby on a Raspberry "mini distro"

Question

I installed this little disk image on a 1GB SD card. I would like to run ruby within this system, which is not installed yet. I decided to use rbenv instead of RVM (I have my reasons).

My understanding is that i should first install rbenv (done), and then from within rbenv: ruby.

rbenv install 1.8.7-p375 gives me errors about missing tools and commands, which I then try to install. Last missing command/tool was yacc. What is it? What big meta package am I missing?

Stuff I did to the bare-bones installation of my Raspberry Pi:

apt-get update
apt-get install git
(install rbenv)
apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install subversion
apt-get install autoconf

Isn't there a simpler way to make sure I do have everything needed to successfully produce a valid ruby installation?

Answer 1

Yacc is a tool often used together with Lex to create a language parser, which is a critical part of a code interpreter such as ruby. The language (in this case Ruby) is described using a special notation understood by yacc, which then compiles (part of) the parser.

So yeah, you need it. There are yacc compatible tools such as bison that might be used in its place, however; if that's an easier option for you then check if rbenv can work with it instead.