Man I haven't thought that my initial question (for which I was a
little ashamed) would bring so many things to light.

I would say that by reading this thread, I just figured out that I
will probably have, from time to time, to kindly ask experienced
users/initial developers (but this might be another problem, because
they may lack the resources too) to provide me with the Win
compatibile package compiled against a One-Click-Ruby (damn this
sounds like I will never get them).

I have some questions about last Austin's message:

On 7/18/06, ara.t.howard / noaa.gov <ara.t.howard / noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Curt Hibbs wrote:
> [...]
> i think this is a greatly missed point.  if it could be guaranteed that
> __any__ ruby could compile binary extensins for itself (because it required a
> decent compiler toolchain to compile itself) then developers would be freed to
> develop binary extensions that speed ruby up and know that all ruby's could
> compile them up themselves.

How this can be done? I mean, it looks like Ruby should come with a
toolset for each avail platform that would allow compilation/building
of extensions. If I get this correctly, this looks pretty impossible,
because as far as I saw, there are different persons building distros
for different platforms. Not to speak, that maybe this may raise
licensing problems. In case I got it wrongly, I apologize.

> think about what that might to for ruby's speed!
> as it stand now making a binary installation that's portable is simply too
> great a burden to expect many developers to put them selves through - we do
> this for free after all.  why should tim have to figure out how to make a
> cross platform image magic installation when the build process of ruby itself
> has already done so?  why should the next developer have to re-invent the
> wheel already again?  what i'm saying is that the standards of
> sh/configure/gcc, etc solve the bane of every binary ruby extension developers
> worst nightmare - portability - __already__.  to not leverage this fact is a
> massive violation of dry to say the least.
>

The benefits would be amazing. But, I really don't think there is
really a solution for this "support-all-platforms" problem (and this
is a very old one).

BR,

./alex
--
.w( the_mindstorm )p.

> in addition, having a decent environment guaranteed for every ruby opens many,
> many possibilities - imagine if this worked for any ruby
>
>    system 'command >/dev/null 2>&1'
>
> guess how many times that's come up on the list ;-)
>
> in summary, a move towards any vc product will be a move not away from the abi
> incompatibilty problem - but simply towards a different one.
>
> hopefully i will not start any flames, but that's my 2 cts.
>
> -a
> --
> suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
> makes the suffering disappear.
> - h.h. the 14th dali lama
>
>