From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2008-03-26T23:31:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Bootstrapping Ruby with MinGW: selfhosted and test sandbox!

On 25/03/2008, Luis Lavena <luislavena@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 25, 12:29 pm, James Tucker <jftuc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>  > On 25 Mar 2008, at 13:14, Luis Lavena wrote:
>  >
>
> > > To solve this I'll require a lot of deep tracing inside ruby, and I
>  > > still want to fix the redirected IO issues I had with Readline and
>  > > still noone replied.
>  >
>  > As you know Luis, I'm desperately trying to make time to come and help
>  > you, sort out some of the code i can donate, etc. Sadly, time is
>  > lacking.
>
>
> I know about you James, and I'm not pointing fingers to anyone, but I
>  heard lot of folks scream that OCI have problems, but they, even have
>  plenty of C or Ruby knowledge, don't offer their help.

For me either OCI or the new installer is good enough. I know there
are problems with the way OCI is built but they did not affect me so
far :-P

I see that you have put lots of time into researching how things are
done on Windows, many thanks for that. I do not have much experience
with Windows programming but I hope that now applying fixes and
enhancements to Ruby on Windows will be as easy and streamlined as on
other platforms.

As far as I know for the few scripts I use on Windows I could replace
the OCI with the mingw built ruby.

>
>  > I know there are a lot of the long-term
>  > rubyists who simply say "Oh we don't care about Windows" or "It's a
>  > broken platform" / whatever. The fact is, actually getting a
>  > performant stable interpreter on the platform would probably do more
>  > for the language than any other single action. Of course OCI download
>  > numbers from rubyforge can easily attest to this.
>
>
> Yes, it seems that today, noone ever used or started computing running
>  over a M$ OS... DOS or even Windows.
>
>  All them reject their roots ;-)

Actually I started with the ZX Spectrum BASIC IDE(if you may call it
one). Of course, DOS was better than that, and Windows was eventually
better than DOS but before that I found GNU/Linux is even better in
not getting into my way. When I went back to Windows I found that they
are quite hard to work with.
This is changing somewhat with the possibility to use alternate GUI
shell, MSYS, and whatnot but it's still a hassle to set up, and stuff
breaks if you do not use the default settings for everything. I do not
reject Windows, and I still use dosemu but once better alternative
than Linux and BSD appears I will leave them  behind as well.

Hate all the OSes equally for their inflexibility and poor design ;-)

>
>  I'll keep Windows as my main platform, since I'm quite comfortable
>  with it. To be honest the only language that give me so many troubles
>  with it is Ruby (and I can provide a long list of languages and tools
>  I have used since I started with computers late in the 80's).
>

Yes, each pick their poison :-P

Thanks

Michal