From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2004-04-22T13:03:36+09:00
Subject: Re: how to get ri/rdoc working for 1.8.1 on Windows?

Dave Thomas wrote:
>
> On Apr 21, 2004, at 18:45, Jos Backus wrote:
>
> > Perhaps Lothar meant to say that rdoc in the 1.8.1 distribution
> > doesn't work,
> > and that he is wondering whether anybody has tried to run the latest
> > rdoc from
> > CVS against a stock 1.8.1 install because the latest rdoc appears to
> > work
> > fine?
>
> The latest RDoc is part of the Ruby source distribution, and so you'd
> have a newer version of Ruby lying around anyway... :)
>
> > It sure would be nice to see 1.8.2 be released soon, as this would
> > give us
> > working online documentation (using rdoc/ri) on Unix at least.
> > rdoc/ri in
> > 1.8.1 is not even working there.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this. On Unix, 1.8.1 and 1.9 both work just
> fine: I use them every day. You just grab the latest, configure and
> make install as normal, and RDoc is automatically run and the
> documentation built.
>
> This is very frustrating for me. I understand there are problems with
> how the Windows installer was built, and it looks like Curt is going to
> sort that out. Of the stuff in my control, what needs to be done to get
> rdoc/ri working for folks who can't currently use it?

A lot of this seems somewhat muddy to me as well. Here's what I know:

1) Our process for building the ruby installer for windows *does* run rdoc
to create the ri database. Unfortunately, it turns out those files didn't
get copied into the installer. I zipped up these files so you can download
them here:

   http://curthibbs.us/share.zip

Unzip this into your ruby install dir (you should then have a "share"
subdirectory in your ruby install dir).

2) rdoc.bat in the bin directory has 4 bad paths in them (all near the top
of the file). You don't need to delete his batch file, just change the paths
to your ruby install dir ("c:\ruby" by default).

3) "rdoc" and "ri" in the bin directory are missing their ".rb"
extensions -- simply rename them.

When I do these three things, I can run rdoc and ri without any problems.
Let me know if this works for you.

Curt