From: Chris Gehlker Date: 2002-03-24T10:11:54+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for Mac OS 10.1 On 3/23/02 1:48 PM, "Jim Freeze" wrote: > Hi: > > I am thinking about getting a mac laptop > with OS 10. Does Ruby work well with the Mac? > That is, easy to install, no missing features, > etc. I currently use Ruby on FreeBSD and SunOS. > > I assume that it does (all I do now are commandline > programs) since OS 10 is really FreeBSD under the hood. Here is what to watch out for. 1) Stuffit Expander, The automatic unarchiver that comes with Mac OS X will mangle some path names when it unarchives the tgz file. Throw away anything it produces and use GNU tar or BSD tar, both included, to unarchive the download. OpenUp, a free (both senses) GUI wrapper around BSD tar also works. 2) configure needs the --enable-shared option to properly build Ruby on OSX. It needs --mandir='/usr/local/share/man' to put Ruby's man pages in the OSX default MANPATH 3) There are a few glitches with with Ruby not understanding frameworks (yet). So sometimes if you have something installed that�s a framework on MacOSX, you have to put symlinks to the headers and libraries inside the framework into some 'standard place' so Ruby can find it. If you've used Ruby with GNUStep, it's the same issue. The problem show up with Tk/Tcl and it's dependencies. 4) Nothing really to do with Ruby. Terminal on OSX is quite a nice program but sometimes, if you are like me, you don't want any window server at all. The only way to kill the window server on OSX is to log out and then type >console (with the >) for user name at the login prompt. OSX will then kill Quartz and drop you into bare Darwin where you can log in as yourself. I hope I've conveyed that any problems with Ruby on OSX are pretty trivial. Nothing like the problems that Windows users seem to have. -- Conversation, n. A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor. -Ambrose Bierce