From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2008-04-08T00:40:08+09:00
Subject: Re: gem build documentation for new gems?

On 7 abr, 11:30, Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackr...@googlemail.com> wrote:
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> Gerardo Santana Gómez Garrido wrote:
>
> | Well, Luis Lavena's work is promising. It's time for extension
> | developers to try this environment and make the changes needed. After
> | that, anybody would be able to automatically download and build
> | extensions.
>
> It indeed is. However, the best solution would be to offer an SDKish
> package for developers, and a RREish (Ruby Runtime Environment :P) at
> the same time. The former for developers, and the latter for end-users.
>

Hey Phillip,

Thank you for testing and advertising the progress of One-Click
Installer with MinGW.

For the record, there is a plan for two packages: A Runtime
Environment (Ruby+RubyGems) and a Developer Kit (MinGW+MSYS), as
described in my blog:

http://blog.mmediasys.com/2008/03/29/progress-of-one-click-installer-rubyinstaller/

The idea is those gems that didn't come pre-built for i386-mingw32
platform, you can install the Developer Kit and get it build, without
messing with manually getting MinGW and MSYS installed.

> However, this distinction is a bit blurry, with Ruby not compiling to
> byte-code/machine code, and not needing a compiler environment as Java does.
>
> However, I'm of the opinion that nobody who doesn't want to, shouldn't
> *have to* compile extensions.
>

Well, is not easy for gem developers provides pre-built binaries for
their work across every platform ruby is available. Sometimes they
need our help ;-)

> And to handle these case, it is necessary to define a way to handle
> header files and source files on the one hand, and to handle "just" the
> extensions in a neat way (integrated to RubyGems would be best.
> Something like a #has_gcc_compiler? method.

I had discussed this several times with lots of folks, is not RubyGems
responsability handle your compiler needs, currently it fires the make/
nmake procedure after called extconf script.

Also, you can provide optionals to extconf (mkmf) with --path-to-this-
library, which will keep your MinGW environment clean. That is a good
practice on other platforms, should be the same for Windows.

> *shrugs*
>

;-)

Regards,
--
Luis Lavena