Today I ran into trouble installing therubyracer on Ruby 1.8. The installation failed with

*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
    --with-opt-dir
    --without-opt-dir
    --with-opt-include
    --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
    --with-opt-lib
    --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
    --with-make-prog
    --without-make-prog
    --srcdir=.
    --curdir
    --ruby=/home/thomas/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p374/bin/ruby

extconf.rb:15: undefined method `include_path' for Libv8:Module (NoMethodError)

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This is caused by therubyracer's extconf.rb requiring libv8 without Bundler. So it gets the most recent version on your local machine, which might be incompatible with the version of therubyracer you're currently building.

In order to fix that, remove all versions ob 'libv8':

gem uninstall libv8
Select gem to uninstall:
 1. libv8-3.3.10.2-x86_64-linux
 2. libv8-3.11.8.17-x86_64-linux
 3. libv8-3.16.14.3-x86_64-linux
 4. All versions
> 4

Installing therubyracer should work now.