From: Guillaume Marcais <guslist@...>
Date: 2005-12-25T00:08:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Native cross-compiling (-packing) with GUI

Le 23 d�c. 05, � 14:44, Meillo r e t u r n s a �crit :

> Hi community,
>
> i'm brand new to Ruby, but i like what i've seen by now.
>
>
> After some time with Lazarus ( http://lazarus.freepascal.org ) and gcj 
> (
> http://gcc.gnu.org/java ) i unfortunately haven't found what i am 
> really
> looking for. I hope i'll find it in Ruby.
>
>
> I want:
>
> 1) coding on a GNU/Linux-machine
> 2) creating GUI-programs (if possible with the luxus of a GUI-designer)
> 3) compiling (or packing) against linux _and_ win32 (=cross-compiling)
> ( 4) the compiled executable should fit on one 1.44-floppy ... if
> possible )
>
> my aim:
> I want to share my programs to friends of mine (mostly windows-user),
> and i dont want any installation-routine - i just want one executable
> (or a folder with exe, dll/so, textfiles, etc) - so that i can explain
> them: "download [file] from [url], unzip, and double-click on
> [name].exe"
>
>
>
> i searched the web for the last 3 days, but couldn't find really
> anything that matches point 3) from above - i tried exerb (of course)
> but couldn't create a working fox-gui-program (perhaps that was just a
> fault of some miss-matching versions :-? ) ... but fox could be good - 
> i
> think
> Then i tried RubyScript2Exe, but it's not possible to cross-compile 
> with
> it (will it ever be??) (does it run through wine? - haven't tried yet).

I don't think it will be possible to cross-compile with RubyScript2Exe. 
My quick experiment of ruby with wine was not very successful. 
Although, one thing that stopped me is that wine implementation is 
based on win98 and the tools from win32-utils[1] works only on 2000/XP. 
It might be possible to get wine to work as 2000/XP, not sure.

Maybe it is doable to use qemu or another hardware emulator to 
test/package your script on windows without leaving your linux machine.

At this point, I also do all my development on Linux, but when the time 
comes to package the app for windows, I run it on windows. At least to 
see what it looks like and iron out the remaining cross-platform 
wrinkles.

Guillaume.

[1] http://rubyforge.org/projects/win32utils/