From: Stuart Ellis <stuart@...>
Date: 2010-10-16T05:54:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Standard Environment

I agree with Quintus - to run the standard implementation of Ruby on Windows painlessly, use RubyInstaller with the DevKit added.

As far as standard gems go, I now use Bundler for every project - the Bundler gem facility builds a good minimal project structure, and the dependency management quickly becomes a time saver as the project grows. It plays well with Git branches, so you can even have different dependencies for different branches of your project.

On 15 Oct 2010, at 20:45, Quintus wrote:

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> Am 15.10.2010 20:40, schrieb Don Norcott:
>> But I would like to know what gems people have loaded for a typical
>> install.  
> 
> I think which gems one has installed depends on which are needed. I just
> have very few gems I always install ontop of a new Ruby installation,
> the others come when they are needed. They usual way is to query
> Rubygems.org's search function with a topic and pick one of the
> resulting gems.
> The few gems I usually install are these ones:
> 
> * hanna: I really hate that standard Darkfish output. hanna looks much
> nicer (and I hope it will be updated sometime...)
> * RedCloth: I write many things in Textile and format the resulting HTML.
> * coderay: When I write about coding, I need a powerful syntax highlighter.
> * redcar: Programming editor
> * test-unit: Yeah, I'm still using it...
> * term-ansicolor: For colored console output (works on windows only in
> combination with win32-console)
> * wxruby-ruby19: For GUI development
> 
> But as I'm developing  many different things, the number of installed
> gems grows and currently I have 30 gems installed. The most ones are
> dependencies of other gems, though.
>> 
>> I am sure there are many gems I could benefit from if I knew what they
>> were.  What other gems would typically be installed and what packages
>> are installed by other than a gem install (download windows binaries).
> 
> Nearly every piece of Ruby library software is available as a gem. On
> Windows, you should install the RubyInstaller Devkit to get access to
> all of them.
> Beside gems, I only download a C extension's external dependencies for
> Ruby.
> 
>> One of the reasons I am asking is that a gem I wanted to install
>> required libxml2. I Installed libxml-ruby (1.1.4 ruby x86-mswin32-60)
>> and the install process determined that zlib was missing (suspect a few
>> others as well)  When I looked at the libxml2 make file it appeared to
>> be for a ruby 1.8 install.
> 
> zlib shouldn't be missing. Where did you get your Ruby from? The
> standard RubyInstaller ( http://rubyinstaller.org ) ships with zlib
> precompiled for Windows.
> 
>> I then did some digging around and found dll,lib and header files
>> available pre-built.  Rather than installing the gem and this appears to
>> be the route for me to take (but how would I know the gem build was for
>> 1.8? without looking at the make file or is this is fine for 1.92 as
>> well)
> 
> 
> 
>> I am thinking of perhaps uninstalling and re-installing Ruby mostly to
>> get a better directory structure.  Should I perhaps be dropping back to
>> Ruby 1.8 for better compatibility?.
> 
> Although I mainly work on my Ubuntu Linux system, 1.9.2-p0 works fine
> for me on Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bits.
> As I asked above: Where did you get your Ruby from? The mswin32-build is
> not the normal way to go on Windows anymore, switch to the mingw32 build
> from the RubyInstaller team.
> 
>> Thanks Don
>> 
> 
> Vale,
> Marvin
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---
Stuart Ellis
stuart@stuartellis.eu