From: Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2008-04-07T23:08:01+09:00
Subject: Re: gem build documentation for new gems?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Gerardo Santana G�mez Garrido wrote:

| Yeah, there are some people like that writing open source software.

If it were only "some", my life would be easier.

| Fortunately it doesn't happen everywhere. OpenBSD for example, they do
| not add any feature if it is not documented.

And we (all of us, I'm guilty of providing insufficient documentation
myself) need to strive to set the bar as high as possible.

| I have checked the page again, it was generated in 2005. This is
| unacceptable. Being gratis or open source is not an excuse.

However, I'm certain the RubyGem developers (or maintainers of any
documentation), will be grateful for patches or new documentation.

And to put my money where my mouth is, I'll write up a bare-bones
tutorial on how to build a gem, and send it off to the Rake folks (I'm
using Rake to generate my gems and packaging, so cut me *some* slack,
will you. :P)

|
| Why not compile natively on Windows?

Setting up a MinGW/MSYS environment is a bit of a hassle, especially if
you want GCC 4, since the MinGW32 folks lag behind on that.

However, I've asked myself that same question. Trouble would be to
define the Ruby environment for building extensions for things like
GTK+/GNOME2, which are available pre-compiled at the moment (storage of
header-files, how mkmf works, what needs to be handled, etc. In short, I
don't know the scope of this tangled mess just yet, and can't start
unraveling the threads).

The up-shoot is, that I was able to install the tmail extension with
Luis' installer recipe (and tmail compiled itself happily. I have no
idea if it works, though :P), which makes me wonder if it isn't possible
to distribute a Ruby version which comes with a compiler environment for
developers, with an option to build a Ruby redistributable (sort of like
the Visual C runtime, or a Java VM) for deployment, and/or have a Ruby
distribution for end-users only, who want to run pre-defined scripts,
they get handed by somebody (An analogue of the Java world: A Ruby SDK
ala the JDK for developers, and a Ruby RE ala the JRE for end users).

In principle this is possible, as Rubyscript2exe, and exerb demonstrate.

If *anybody* has an idea how to tackle the problem of redistributing
extensions, I'd be grateful as heck.

Sadly, I'm no C/C++ guru, so I'm not able to dig into C code, where
needed. And I'm not that much of a Ruby programmer, that I can read Ruby
as second nature, parsing it in my head. :(

- --
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan

You summoned me, Captain? asked T. Earl Grey, hotly.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkf6KsAACgkQbtAgaoJTgL9WagCfYaRKNREi1qs2bJYmQjAnwswn
HaQAoKRWIjIeFqKFSLBz4QNE7Pq78Ab3
=xd+W
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----