From: Benoit Cerrina <benoit.cerrina@...>
Date: 2001-10-02T08:10:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21899] Re: Let's work on Windows support


"Rich Kilmer" <rich@infoether.com> wrote in message
news:NDBBKPEKEKOELOHKPCNOGEGOCGAA.rich@infoether.com...
> Excellent idea Dave...I switched to the MinGW installation located
(http://www.ruby-lang.org/~eban/ruby/binaries/mingw/) about a month ago
(from your distribution) because of random networking issues I was having
with Cygwin.  I needed a Win32 build that had some of the RAA extensions
built for it and was pleased to see that the same site had and ./ext folder
with "common" native extensions pre-built.

Hi,
I compeletely agree there, I also got issues with cygwin and gtk.  Another
good thing about mingw is that like cygwin it is freely
available.  Since the other working alternative is MSVC which is far from
free.

>
> One thing I noticed was there was no "support" DLL for MinGW (it
cross-compiles to Win32), which is nice.  The distribution size is small as
well.  One issue with MinGW though is the development tools are about 9MB to
download (27MB to install).  This may be an issue for people wanting to
write native extensions (if they need MinGW libraries to do it...this may
not be necessary though).
>
> I think that arriving at a single "standard" distribution for Win32 is
incredibly important to wider use/success of Ruby.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rich Kilmer
>
Definitely