I'm following the instructions here, and so far so good, but I'm having trouble figuring out this part:
Lastly, download your target version from the ruby odbc project page and do a MD5 checksum on it.
What exactly am I supposed to be running MD5 on? The tar file? extconf.rb? I've been poking around for awhile but I just don't know enough to find the answer. Thanks in advance.
It looks like your instructions came from here: http://www.metaskills.net/2009/9/5/the-ultimate-os-x-snow-leopard-stack-for-rails-development-x86_64-macports-ruby-1-8-1-9-sql-server-more
They give an example md5sum of 36d215...b99 and say it was for the 0.9997 release. Looking at the available releases ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz matches that md5sum. From the command-line:
$ md5sum ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
36d21519795c3edc8bc63b1ec6682b99 ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
It looks like the tar.gz is what you're looking for.
You may get better results if you start from these instructions, than from a random third-party.
The MD5 checksum they tell you to run has no functional effect -- it's just to check whether the file you downloaded matches the file the producer uploaded, adding a layer of Trojan protection, and potentially preventing headaches if decompression/extraction fails. You can proceed without the checksum if you trust the source, or if you just can't figure out how to run it.
Let us (OpenLink Software, producer of the ODBC Adapter for Ruby on Rails) know if you run into issues from there -- we want to fix things that are broken....