From: intc_ctor@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-03-05T05:49:41+09:00
Subject: Ruby 1.8.1 on OS X Panther and RubyCocoa

Being new to OS X (about 2 weeks now).  

What's the best way to upgrade from the included Ruby (1.6.8) to
1.8.1?

A couple of other questions:

1. I want to use RubyCocoa; are there any issues if I upgrade to
1.8.1?
2. In the future it would be cool to be able to release my RubyCocoa
creations into the OS X wild (even to non-Ruby users).  Is there any
way currently to package a RubyCocoa app so that anyone who downloads
it can just run it without having to go and get the RubyCocoa libs?

I guess it would be nice if Apple included RubyCocoa libs with their
next release of OS X, that would make #2 easy.  It seems like there
are a couple of ways to achieve this:
1) We include RubyCocoa in the standard Ruby release (of course it
wouldn't get compiled on Windows platforms, but it could potentially
work with GNUStep on Linux) as another GUI lib (like we include FOX
and TK support now).
2) We lobby Apple to include RubyCocoa in OS X 10.4

#1 pros: we as a community have more control over it and it allows
people to (potentially) create Cocoa apps that run on both OS X and
Linux (GNUStep) platforms.  Of course, I suspect the full API isn't
available on Linux (like the AddressBook API for example).  However,
#1 would also add a lot of code to the standard Ruby distribution that
would primarily benefit only one platform, so it may not be a good
option.

Pehaps there is another option:
3) Those of us in the Ruby community who use OS X (seems to be a
growing number)  create a distribution of Ruby for OS X that includes
RubyCocoa and try to get Apple to include it in 10.4.  This would be
kind of like the Windows version of Ruby.

It's great to have Ruby included on OS X, but it would be even better
if we could write Cocoa apps with it right out of the box.  Is anyone
at Apple listening?

Phil