From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2002-06-20T22:48:15+09:00
Subject: Re: releasing system?

> Is there a Ruby Way to releasing?  For example, I've used Python's
> distutils in the past.
> 
> Or should I just build a .tar.gz that includes a README that tells the
> user to "cd src; make && make install"?

Sadly, there is no real standard for this yet (although I think we 
should shoot for a much higher standard than the distutils ;) There are 
some promising things in the works, like RubyGems and rpkg (and probably 
others I haven't kept up with) but certainly no standard has emerged yet.

If it's a C/C++-based extension you want to be sure to include an 
extconf.rb script so that a platform-appropriate Makefile gets 
generated. This is described (among other places) in the README.EXT file 
from the Ruby source code distribution, and in books like "Programming 
Ruby" and the "Ruby Developer's Guide".

If your software consists of more than "just" the C extension part -- 
for example, supporting scripts and library files -- you might also take 
a look at Minero Aoki's setup.rb script 
(http://www.loveruby.net/en/setup.html). This is the system I'm 
currently using for FXRuby and it basically works well. He does not yet 
have support for some things I'd like, such as documentation files and 
test scripts, but it's about as good as it gets short of rolling your 
own solution.

> How about documentation?  Is there any standard way to build it?  I have
> the .rd file and a Makefile that runs rd2, but that doesn't do any sort
> of installation.  (Is there a standardized procedure for installing
> documentation on *nix systems?  I've been in the Debian world for so
> long I can't remember what is standard and what is just Debian
> policy...)

I don't think it's standardized. On my Red Hat 7.2 system, documentation 
files tend to get installed in places like /usr/share/doc (or 
/usr/local/share/doc) but I don't know that this is true in general.