Rake undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass, on EC2 with Amazon default AMI

[natevw]

After getting dependencies:
sudo yum install git gcc gcc-c++ libtool libcurl-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/56872/rake-0.8.7.tgz # then installed...

I encountered the following error when using rake:
[ec2-user@ip-X-X-X-X build-couchdb]$ rake --trace
(in /home/ec2-user/build-couchdb)
/home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/distros.rb:53: warning: statement not reached
/home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/couchdb.rake:29: warning: (...) interpreted as grouped expression
rake aborted!
undefined method []' for nil:NilClass /home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/lib.rb:53:inpackage_dep'
/home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/toolchain.rake:14
/home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/toolchain.rake:10:in each' /home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/toolchain.rake:10 /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:1882:inin_namespace'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:910:in namespace' /home/ec2-user/build-couchdb/tasks/toolchain.rake:6 /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:1620:inload'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:1620:in load' /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2451:inload_imports'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2390:in raw_load_rakefile' /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2017:inload_rakefile'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2068:in standard_exception_handling' /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2016:inload_rakefile'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2000:in run' /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:2068:instandard_exception_handling'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rake.rb:1998:in `run'
/usr/bin/rake:32

[natevw]

I made detect_distro in tasks/distros.rb simply return [:fedora, 100] at its top, and it seems to be compiling much more happily. Apparently the code to print out a human-readable error message on unknown platforms is not getting triggered.

/etc/system-release says:
Amazon Linux AMI release 1 (beta)

[jhs]

Thanks for the heads-up!

What is the ID for that AMI? Among other ways, you can get the ID from the internal AWS web API:

curl 169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ami-id ; echo

Or:

wget --quiet -O - 169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ami-id ; echo

[natevw]

Neat, didn't know even know about that API yet (I'm an EC2 noob, which is why I stuck with Amazon's "default" AMI to begin with...)! Anyway, it reports:

ami-d40e5e91

[zgohr]

Same issue with Linux Mint.