Ruby 1.9 v 1.8? about ruby-zbar HOT 2 CLOSED

Hmm. Well, you have --with-jpeg, which IIRC is the only zbar flag ruby-zbar can notice. If FFI isn't exploding, either by raising exceptions or crashing, I'd guess that calls to zbar are happening properly, and that the failed detection has more to do with libzbar than the Ruby wrapper.

Five ideas:

1. Call File.read(jpg, :binmode => true), instead of just File.read(jpg). By default, Ruby will treat it as text, and possibly garbling the bits as it changes encodings.
2. Call Zbar.verbosity = 100, and see if you get anything on stderr.
3. Cut out the JPEG -> Y800 step inside Zbar. Take an image that works in development but fails in production, convert it to .pgm ahead of time, and call ZBar::Image.from_pgm() instead.
4. Try invoking the production copy of libzbar on the image without Ruby. zbar-0.10/examples/ contains some simple C/C++ binaries, and knowing if they work or not would help narrow down the issue.
5. Upgrade your Mac to 1.9.2, at least for that project, using rvm. That's a good idea anyway, and would nail down any other 1.9 gotchas.

ruby-zbar works on 1.9.2, at least on my Mac, using the upstream barcode.png which I converted to PGM:

$ irb -rzbar
ruby-1.9.2-p180 :001 > pp ZBar::Image.from_pgm(File.open('barcode.pgm', 'rb')).process
[#<ZBar::Symbol:0x00000100aade20
  @addon="",
  @data="9876543210128",
...

from ruby-zbar.

Never mind -- in Ruby 1.8 we weren't explicitly reading the file as binary. Can't get away with that in 1.9!

from ruby-zbar.