On Sep 9, 2010, at 11:25 , Roger Pack wrote: >>> This also causes odd failures when using 1.9 on windows, because if >>> you do a "gem install win32api" it ends up installing a gem that has >>> binaries compiled only compatible with 1.8, so it fails at runtime. >>=20 >> I believe those are separate things, those issues can be solved with >> fat-binary gems or compiler been available for Windows users. >=20 > To me it feels like more of a work around than a solution. Plus I'm > not sure that fat-binary gems would be an ideal way to distribute std > libs. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to maintain a single = C codebase to deal with 2 vastly different Ruby C APIs. The amount of = ifdef'ing would be unmaintainable, and in some cases, the designs aren't = even compatible. It isn't a workaround, it is a necessity for sanity.