From: Pierre Baillet <oct@...>
Date: 2002-08-27T17:12:22+09:00
Subject: [long]Re: Ruby developers: help push RPKG development and usage forward!! (it is like CPAN.pm, only Ruby)

Intro: sorry for the long post, I wanted to speak, hope you won't mind
too much.


Hello,

to follow-up ruby-talk[47974], may i suggest that current rpkg be
included in the 1.X installers Andy is building ? 

As far as i'm concerned, i would love to use rpkg if it was working on my
win32 ruby without a hassle. But AFAIK, rpkg depends on zlib which is
not straightforward to get(/build) under win32 platforms hence my suggestion.

I think there is quite a problem around these portability issues. Core
ruby runs very well on win32 but most of the extensions, you have to
build yourself. Even if this is not a problem to real windows coders,
this can be quite a pain for people who want to give a try to ruby and
say xmlparser on a win32 box. Some extensions, due to their complexity
are even almost unbuildable on win32 boxes. And the problem is not ruby
related but rather "library" related.

Using more often rpkg would allow us to have binary packages (which rpkg
supports, if i remember well) and only a few people will have to worry
about building this library to get ruby working.

What do people think about that ? Maybe i'm too naive about this, but
this is something that is also a problem in perl even if the perl/win32
(activestate i guess) is less likely to be used by real perl hackers
whereas ruby/win32 is the best choice for the windows platforms. If Ruby
could narrow this gap, this could probably be a very good thing for the
community.


On Tue, Aug 27, 2002, M S wrote:
> The project needs people to
> help with debugging/development on platforms other than Linux,
> although it looks like the code is pretty portable and has few
> dependencies.


And Matz, thanks again, coding has become a pleasure for me :)
-- 
Pierre Baillet
Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there
is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, "form is emptiness." That all things
are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, "Emptiness is
form." One should not think that these are two separate things.
Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samoura�