It should be easier than this. I thought I had a decent Rails installation running on my MacBook Pro but TextMate was giving me some grief when shelling out to execute certain commands (like pulling down the schema for a model).

This worried me - my environment seemed OK, but if TextMate was failing then there's likely some other lurking problem. It took me about 2 hours to unwind everything and get my environment working so that I could see this.

The root cause? I'm not 100% sure, but here are a few hypothesis:

• I had a mixed MacPorts and Leopard install of Ruby and Rails
• I likely had some path issue that I cleaned up, causing gems to not be found like they should
• I had some strange mixtures of legacy and new ports installed that needed some serious work to clean up.

I think the concept of MacPorts is good, but in reality it shouldn't be this hard. My experience with apt-get on Ubuntu was about 100% better.

Oh well, all is good now. I absolutely love the new TextMate Rails 2 bundle.