Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
> I'd like to see a framework for building and testing binary releases 
> of Ruby
> extensions on a range of different platforms (including Unix flavors). It
> might be possible to ship binary gems with several different binaries 
> built
> into the gem, and the gem installer detect which is the most 
> compatible one
> on any given target machine. There already is nice stuff in extconf for
> specifying required header and library dependencies. Can this be 
> extended in
> a standard way so that a binary-gem builder can specify a range of 
> platforms
> and have all the respective binaries included in the production gem? 
> Maybe
> this would require some collaboration, with people making different build
> environments available to others, possibly through a secure mechanism
> sitting behind a Rails app? I'd be willing to make some different Unix 
> and
> Solaris flavors available in a build tree so that the gems hosted at
> Rubyforge could be built on my hardware and the binaries loaded back to
> Rubyforge for final integration by rake. And hopefully others could
> contribute different platforms.


This sounds like a suggestion for a Ruby extension compile farm. That's 
an idea I could seriously get behind.