From: Phillip Gawlowski <pg@...>
Date: 2009-12-28T14:16:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Installing Gems on Windows

On 28.12.2009 06:00, Augusto Esteves wrote:

> I've followed your instructions and I was able to get somewhere :) After
> it starts building the native extensions I get a bunch of errors that
> are related to a library I need to run this gem, which is the libnfc.
>
> I have the binaries for this library, is there a way of letting the Gem
> installer know how to get the files it needs?

The MinGW compiler used by ruby needs to know where the *header* files 
are to get them.

My guess is that you need the source for libnfc, and add their path to 
your your %path% environment variable (if only temporarily), by doing 
something like "set path = %path%;C:\Path\To\Header\Files", and then 
"gem install".

Mind, this doesn't guarantee, at all, that your gem will work. Or even 
that the libnfc you have works (the lib has to be compiled for windows, 
with a compiler compatible to MinGW32's gcc3.4 to be usable by Ruby), 
*and* the header files have to be usable for Windows, too.

Linux and Windows platforms are *not* compatible to each other, so 
unless you know your way around C, and can fix the errors gcc/gem hands 
you, you'll either have to fix the errors yourself, or lobby the 
libnfc/nfc-gem maintainers to fix the issue (if, indeed, this is an 
issue for them in the first place).

--
Phillip Gawlowski