From: Nobuyoshi Nakada <nobu@...>
Date: 2007-05-16T23:31:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Coexistency Problem: cygwin + Ruby for Window (and suggestion for improving the Ruby installer)

Hi,

At Wed, 16 May 2007 22:32:32 +0900,
Ronald Fischer wrote in [ruby-talk:251791]:
> > I imagined if it might read any fallback file like
> > /etc/inputrc, e.g., $INSTDIR/etc/inputrc or something (assume
> > there is readline.dll underneath $INSTDIR/bin), without
> > particular environment variables.
> > Or, setting HOME as $HOMEDRIVE/$HOMEPATH or $USERPROFILE at
> > initialization of ruby, like as 1.9 does.
> 
> Even this would not help. The conflict is basically this:
> 
> Ruby uses (probably for irb, and for those Ruby functions
> which are "readline" aware) READLINE.DLL. This DLL *does*
> have, to the best of my knowledge, a fallback mechanism
> about where to look for a definition file in case INPUTRC
> is not set, or simply use the defaults if none is set.

I meant it would be nice if readline.dll for Windows were had
its own default rc path, or cygwin and mswin-ruby would have
different HOME pathes.  Instead, it seems to get the fallback
path from the registry, "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Free
Software Foundation\libreadline\inputrc-file".

> But imagine for one moment that INPUTRC is not set (and
> the default inputrc file does not exist) and hence READLINE.DLL
> uses its default settings; further assume that we are running
> on a PC with European keyboard, and the user starts (in a 
> Windows Command Shell) irb. The user would find now that he
> is unable to enter certain characters, such as brackets,
> curly braces or the '@' character. This would render irb
> pretty useless for users in, say, Germany (and probably
> also for other European countries using a similar approach
> to generate these keys on their keyboard).

I think I understand the problem.

-- 
Nobu Nakada