From: Bill Guindon <agorilla@...>
Date: 2004-09-10T05:26:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on Windows

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:55:50 +0900, Justin Rudd <justin.rudd@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it just me, or is getting anything other than standard ruby a true
> ordeal on Windows?
> 
> Now I'm sure everyone is snickering right about now, that's OK.
> 

well, not _everyone_, but I'd bet quite a few.

> 
> Now here are my problems -
> * This took 6 hours
> * extconf gave me no ideas that it required a C compiler
> * extconf gave me no ideas what was going wrong (I just got a no)
> 
> I'm a pretty decent Windows programmer (been doing it for 10+ years
> now).  And I think I've got to go through the whole process again to
> get Ruby DBI working and SQLLite/Ruby (which I probably won't use
> since it is GPL).  And PostgresQL.  But for someone starting out with
> Ruby on Windows, would they know they needed a C compiler?  Would they
> know they needed to add __declspec(dllexport) to that one function?

Depends on background.  I've done perl in the past, and knew there
would be limitations when I stuck my nose into Ruby (about a month
ago?  maybe more).
 
> Now let's contrast this with Python.  I go to
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/ and they have an EXE I
> can download, run it, and I can connect to MySQL in under 5 minutes
> (after download).

Where did the EXE come from?  Some kind soul with a bit of c compiler
experience like yourself I'd imagine.  With any luck, soon there will
be more EXE files on RubyForge thanks to you :)
 
> I love Ruby.  And a lot of that love comes from Rails (which I've been
> using quite successfully).  But building an app is harder than it
> should be.

There are packagers out there, granted they won't cover every possible
situation, but they do make life easier (see bottom of page
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?QuickGuideToPackaging)
 
> I'm going to document what I did and post it on my weblog along with
> the binary file that I generated.  Hopefully someone else out there
> can make use of it.

Indeed, we will.   Looking forward to it :)

-- 
Bill Guindon (aka aGorilla)