This seems to have been the problem -- apparently I didn't apt-get openssl
and didn't heed the warning when Erlang's ./configure script told me that it
would leave out SSL support.  Thanks you both, Noah and Dan.

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Noah Slater <nslater@apache.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 04:33:57PM -0700, John Evans wrote:
> > $ bin/couchdb
> > {"init terminating in
> >
> do_boot",{undef,[{crypto,start,[]},{erl_eval,do_apply,5},{init,start_it,1},{init,start_em,1}]}}
>
> Erlang has not been compiled with OpenSSL support.
>
> Perhaps there is a version mismatch or maybe you didn't enable it during
> ./configure
>
> --
> Noah Slater, http://people.apache.org/~nslater/<http://people.apache.org/%7Enslater/>
>