From: stephen.tashiro@...
Date: 2006-03-31T08:33:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Unintentional hype of Ruby irb and ri

I tried the suggestion of installing from source and I like the result
better.  (My suggestion to run rdoc --ri is only useful if you run it
in some directory whose tree contains the source code (*.c) files for
Ruby. )  After an install from source with
../configure
make
su
make install

The ri and irb commands work fine.  But when I try to use FxRuby, the
extension for the Fox Gui Toolkit,  there are problems.  The extension
wants the library libruby.so, which is missing.  I tried

make distclean
../configure --enable-shared --enable-install-doc --enable-pthread
(As if I really knew what I was doing !)
make
make install-all

Then I had a libruby.so and ruby, irb and ri still worked.

However the elementary test
irb> require 'fox14'
fails since it cannot find the files  fox14/core.rb and  fox14/core.so.
 An strace of this process shows it is looking in the correct path for
the files.  (I resorted to running irb in the  fox14 directory.)  The
problem is that the files were not produced when I compiled fox-1.4.32.

I'll be delighted if someone can tell me the answer to that problem.
However to return to generalities:  I think people trying to use Ruby
face more of a challenge than Perl and Python users since they are less
likely to find Ruby installed and ready-to-go.   In the current epoch,
writers of tutorials would do better to give detailed coverage of
installation problems.  Otherwise the pages about how easy and nice
Ruby is will seem a fraud.

For example, if you read the typical exposition of the
require 'xyz'
"command, it doesn't explain how the name 'xyz' is connected to any
file on the machine.  By experiment it seems to search for a directory
named 'xyz'.  What paths does it take?  What files does it need in that
directory?    If everything is perfectly installed you don't have to
worry about this, but in practice you do.