From: Roger Pack <rogerdpack@...>
Date: 2009-08-13T20:18:12+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:24908] Re: [Feature #1857] install *.h and *.inc

> Here's my idea: at the time extconf.rb runs for linecache or ruby-debug-base, pull the Ruby sources from ftp.ruby-lang.org based on the current RUBY_VERSION and RUBY_PATCHLEVEL. Decompress, pull out *.h and *.inc, put it into a directory, and then proceed with the build. All of this in pure Ruby so I don't have to worry about wget or tar on Windows.

That would work.

There is a pure ruby zlib which might be useful.  Of course, you need
a working zlib installed to install any gem, anyway, so you could
assume that's installed.

My own personal perference would be,
say you install gem "ruby_sources" to
/lib/gems/1.8/gems/ruby_sources

extract the sources and store them in
/lib/gems/1.8/gems/ruby_sources/current_version

then you could use them for another side purpose of mine:
running "gem rdoc ruby_sources" would generate local rdocs for your
core of ruby, but I suppose this isn't necessary for a first release.



> If anyone can think of a better approach, please let me know. I don't want this to be something that I have to maintain with every Ruby release.

The kicker is that not every patch number makes it there--what if they
are running trunk, or an odd patch number--you might need to have
sensible fallbacks in these cases.  Though I suppose 99% of us will be
using released patch numbers, and they'll probably stick around on the
ftp site forever, so your original idea is probably sound :)
-r