From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-07-07T10:17:08+09:00
Subject: Re: best way to make .rb into an executable for linux?

On Tuesday, July 06, 2010 07:04:37 pm David Ainley wrote:
> Ben Bleything wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 4:26 PM, David Ainley <wrinkliez@gmail.com>
> > 
> > wrote:
> >> I see. �Well I could use that as a last resort I suppose, but won't the
> >> user have to download the entire Ruby language and gems and whatnot if I
> >> go that route?

Yes. They'll have to do that anyway. All of the solutions here revolve around 
making it easier for your users, but you're not likely to save much in terms 
of bandwidth or disk space with any of these other approaches, unless I'm 
missing something.

> The error is
> 
> ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Are you sure that's it? Almost always, that error is followed by a large 
amount of text which indicates the actual error.

> And Charles, that's a good idea.  Let me give that a try.

I don't know that this is necessarily better. It's a question of whether 
they're more likely to have Ruby or Java installed. It might be easier to 
manage with the gems, though...

If your target is Linux users, and gems aren't good enough, look at building 
debs, RPMs, or whatever your users actually expect. You might be able to 
depend on the more popular gems as native packages, and you might combine that 
with something like bundler to put anything missing into your package.

Of course, at this point, it might be getting a lot more complicated for you 
than a JRuby jar, so I guess that's the advantage.

And of course, build a gem anyway, because that's easy, and because any new 
solutions for building Ruby "executables" are likely to revolve around gems.