From: Alex Gutteridge <alexg@...>
Date: 2007-08-03T09:23:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Deployable project with C source code

On 3 Aug 2007, at 03:06, Ruby Rubyruby wrote:

> Hi.  Ruby novice here.  So far, I have had a great experience
> programming Ruby where I have only been relying on the standard  
> library.
> Lately, I have been wanting to tie some of my tools into a nice GUI
> using QT or Tk.  I understand that running "ruby extconf.rb" will
> dynamically generate a Makefile for me based on my OS, and that I run
> that in order to compile and clean up my code.  I also understand that
> the source code that is provided would extend my Ruby API in order to
> access lower level code that would enable me to access these C  
> libraries
> as objects in Ruby.  What I fail to understand is how to make a  
> project
> that relies on such souce code easily deployable.

A correctly packaged gem would be able to do this (depending on  
exactly what you want to do), read the Pickaxe book chapters on gems/ 
extensions for more details. On the other hand you could look at how  
_why is packaging Shoes (http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/).

Alex Gutteridge

Bioinformatics Center
Kyoto University