From: quixoticsycophant@... (Jeff Mitchell)
Date: 2004-07-23T05:31:59+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Ruby Installer for Windows 1.8.2-14_RC5 (from Ruby 1.8.2 preview1)

"Curt Hibbs" <curt@hibbs.com> wrote in message news:<EAENKKNOJPMNCDMLDOMLOEAPFDAA.curt@hibbs.com>...
> Lothar Scholz wrote:
[...]
> > But this does still not help on binary extensions. And until the
> > brain dead (assuming the build system for extensions is the same as
> > the one for the original interpreter) and completely undocumented binary
> > build system "rb_configure.rb" etc. is changed this is a very
> > serious issue.
> >
> > My personal request here is to include "wxruby.0.4"
> 
> RubyGems *does* support platform-specific binary gems. This was an issue
> that I brought up early on with the RubyGems developers precisely because I
> wanted to package up wxRuby as a set of platform-specific binary gems
> (although that hasn't happened yet). Do you think that wxRuby is mature
> enough?

RubyGems supports binary gems in the sense that you can put any file
type, including binary, into a gem.  But there is no useful support
for binary gems; I asked in [ruby-talk:104609] and [ruby-talk:104486]
and in private email, all without reply.  (By "binary" I mean
precompiled gems.)

For my gems, I experimented with a mypackage-i686-linux-ruby18-1.2.3.gem
naming scheme but decided it was too polluting to the global gem list
since every platform must have a separate, "unrelated" gem.  The naming
scheme mypackage-1.2.3-i686-linux-ruby18.gem is a "Malformed version
number" error.  The precompiled gems were also about twice as large as
a .tbz2 of the same files.

I eventually decided to stick with tarballs with .so files until
rubygems formally supports precompiled extensions.

This could be implemented by recognizing a -linux-i686-ruby18 suffix,
for example.  Currently, when mypackage-1.2.3-i686-linux-ruby18.gem
exists on gems.rubyforge.org/gems/, there is a 404 Not Found error
for "gem -i mypackage".  A first step could be to find gems matching
the host platform suffix when the primary search fails or when the
user requests a binary gem.