I am the Build CouchDB maintainer. I would like to integrate these changes into the system however first I have to track down a PPC Mac!

Since libcurl is a build dependency for couchdb there is really no excuse that it does not ship with Build CouchDB. I have also been receiving pressure from various people (Solaris, old Linux distros, etc.) to write a workaround for the mktmpdir issue so that also must be done. It’s a shame to have to build Ruby and Rake for something so simple like mktmpdir. (Incidentally, I use ruby-inabox for my own projects which is a dead-simple standalone Ruby builder much like build-couchdb: http://github.com/jhs/ruby-inabox .)