From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-07-22T01:10:56+09:00 Subject: Re: One-Click Installer: MinGW? or VC2005? On 7/21/06, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote: > here's a challenge: I won't take your challenge for several reasons. I will forward it on to the VS team when I'm back from vacation. My reasons: 1. I'm currently on vacation. 2. When I'm back from vacation, I have a full work schedule. 3. I need to continue work on things that matter to me, which include PDF::Writer and my impending wedding. 4. I am handing the communication with the VS team over to Curt as soon as I have a chance to pull everything together. 5. I don't need gsl. I oppose the use of MinGW for the Ruby installer. Vehemently. It's *not* the right way, and will only complicate things for 64-bit Windows support (which Vista will have right out of the box). The API support for MinGW is behind and it doesn't interface well with the newer parts of Windows because it's built on an outdated runtime that still has security issues. The problem isn't the toolchain provided by the compiler at this point; it is that Ruby's toolchain isn't sufficiently cross-platform (a la Perl's "perl Makefile.PL" or Python's distutils) and needs to grow up so that you don't even have to think about this. I am also not convinced that everything needs to be compiled with VS2005 to make it work; only extensions and those libraries which do not provide an alternative to the use of "errno" directly (they should be across API calls). -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin@zieglers.ca