CouchDB Install Problems on Snow Leopard: Trace/BPT trap

Just got the new Mac Snow Leopard this weekend! With the OS switching from 32bit to 64bit, i had to recompile much of my development software. CouchDB was particularly troubling.

I deleted all my macports, installed new macports 1.8, built 64bit versions of spidermonkey, icu and erlang using macports. Erlang looked like it was working:

→$erl
Erlang R13B01 (erts-5.7.2)  [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [rq:2]
[async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]
Eshell V5.7.2  (abort with ^G)
1> 1+1.
2
2> q().

I rebuilt couchdb from the latest sources using

./bootstrap; ./configure; make && sudo make install

When I tried to start CouchDB:

→$sudo couchdb
Apache CouchDB 0.10.0a802973 (LogLevel=info) is starting.
Trace/BPT trap

Ouch…no idea what this “Trace/BPT trap” error means, but luckily Benoit Chesneau on the CouchDB user mailing list found out it was a MacPorts build issue and not the code itself. Installing CouchDB and its dependencies from the directly from source solved the issue.  The exact solutions to rebuild from the sources rather macports are shown on the CouchDB wiki install page.