From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-06T22:59:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Oh the pain! Distributing Ruby apps

Sharon Phillips wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've written some small Ruby apps for monitoring things at work but am
> not enjoying distributing them.
> Seems for each person I have to install Ruby, then the extra libraries I
> use (currently just ori8 and net-ssh). I'd like to write a gui front
> end, but shudder at the thought of then having to install qt / fox /
> whatever.
> 
> Am I missing something here? Do I have to do this for each machine in
> order to just let someone else run a Ruby script?
> 
> How can I lessen the pain?
> Is it possible to install the libraries on the LAN and each machine run
> them from there?
> I don't mind installing the Ruby interpreter and I even like Scite (with
> modified a ruby proffile :), it's the extra stuff I'm talking about.
> I've tried rubyscript2exe (we're talking Windows boxes), and it seems to
> work fine for some things but breaks the Oracle bindings.
> 
> I've considered a web app, but I don't have access to a place to serve it.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave
> 
> 

I think the tools that Curt Hibbs uses to build and package the
One-Click Ruby Installer and Instant Rails are all open source. I have
no idea what or where they are, but you should be able to track that
down at RubyForge. Since you're not interested in web apps, I'd
recommend adding your code to the One-Click Ruby Installer and
distributing it that way. Conversely, if you're building a web app, add
it to Instant Rails. ;)

Now, if you need to compile C extensions or be cross-platform, I can't
help you. Maybe Austin Ziegler has gotten somewhere with his pleas to
Microsoft on compilers for Ruby C extensions, but I haven't seen that
topic mentioned here recently.