From: "Austin Ziegler" <halostatue / gmail.com>
>
> They asked for as much information as I can gather on this matter. If
> you have had problems trying to get Ruby or an extension compiled or
> running on Windows for any reason, but especially because of Microsoft
> runtime DLL differences, please provide me as much information as
> possible so that I can pass it on to the VS team at Microsoft.

I'm not sure if this is the sort of information you're looking
for, but I've run into the occasional extension, and/or library
upon which an extension relies, that essentially requires 
mingw/msys to build.

I got RMagick (ruby ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick) to build using
nmake/cl.exe, but it was a total hack.  Building the extension
requires ./configure.  The primary function of ./configure for
the RMagick build, is to analyze the GraphicsMagick/ImageMagick
header files and produce a config header file wherein about
200 configuration #defines are set or cleared, adapting RMagick
to whatever particular build of ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick it's
working with.

(What I did was install the particular version of
GraphicsMagick I wanted, on my linux system, run the RMagick
./configure over there, then bring the generated
rmagick_config.h file back to my windows system.  I also hacked
up RMagick's extconf.rb in order to get it to work with
nmake/cl.exe.)

Some other extensions I suspect may require mingw/msys to build
include rcairo/cairo, DataFlow/PureData, ruby-gstreamer....

The more I run into this, the happier I would be to just have
ALL my ruby extensions (and ruby itself) built with 
mingw/msys.


Regards,

Bill