From: Mark Probert <probertm@...>
Date: 2003-01-13T11:50:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Cygwin Ruby Woes


Hi.

Gavin Sinclair wrote in comp.lang.ruby:
> On Sunday, January 12, 2003, 10:06:16 AM, Mark wrote:
> 
>> If the C extensions are not Unix-specific (ie use fork()) then you
>> can use mingw (www.mingw.org) to compile them.  It gives you gcc
>> plus some additional tools.  That way you can keep the one-click
>> installer ... 
> 
> Has anyone gone down this path?  Have you installed a complete
> unix-like environment based on mingw?  I'd be very interested to know
> some details.
> 
Hmmmm ... not "cmoplete", though a fairly reasonable subset.  Cygwin
gives you such tools as perl which you don't get with msys, the mingw 
environment.  And I think that gdb is pretty unstable under mingw.
You do get rvxt around bash, which is nice, though I also added zsh
form the UnxUtils collection 

    http://www.weihenstephan.de/~syring/win32/UnxUtils.html

to cover some of the bases that the msys version of bash doesn't (the
bash supplied is a little flakey about running some applications). 

As an environment for Ruby it works well.  Better, IMHO, than standard
DOS box (under Win2k).  The XP console is improved, so your shell 
mileage may vary, however, the tools are great.

One caveat about my system is that it is quite messy. In addition
to mingw, I also have cygwin-gcc and MSVC6 as C compilers.  I can 
giev you a "pure mingw" report in a week or so (my work hard-drive
is being replaced and I am going to have to rebuild everything :-( )

Regards,

-mark.