Curt Hibbs wrote:
> This is the whole point of this thread. It appears that the only safe 
> thing
> is that the Ruby runtime and all extensions that its uses (both those
> included with the one-click installer and those provided by third 
> parties)
> need to be using the same compiler and that compiler needs to be freely
> available.
>
> I have two choices VS2005 Express and MinGW. What I really want to 
> know (as
> succinctly as possible) is what the pros and cons are for each path.
>
> Curt
Can *you* freely distribute VS2005 Express, or must a user who wants to 
build extensions with it acquire it themselves?
Can *you* freely distribute MinGW, or must a user who wants to build 
extensions with it acquire it themselves?

My point here is that a "one-click Ruby installer" should have the 
option to install a toolset for building extensions if the user doesn't 
already have that toolset. When I built the LyX editor on Windows, it 
pointed me to URLs for all of the things I needed (MikTeX, Python, etc.) 
That makes a lot of sense for LyX; MiKTeX is huge. But I would have 
preferred as much of the toolset bundled.