On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> On 7/21/06, ara.t.howard / noaa.gov <ara.t.howard / noaa.gov> wrote:
>> here's a challenge:
>
> I won't take your challenge for several reasons. I will forward it on
> to the VS team when I'm back from vacation.
>
> My reasons:
>
> 1. I'm currently on vacation.
> 2. When I'm back from vacation, I have a full work schedule.
> 3. I need to continue work on things that matter to me, which include
> PDF::Writer and my impending wedding.
> 4. I am handing the communication with the VS team over to Curt as
> soon as I have a chance to pull everything together.
> 5. I don't need gsl.

fair enough and  thanks for doing it (when you do).

> I oppose the use of MinGW for the Ruby installer. Vehemently. It's *not* the
> right way, and will only complicate things for 64-bit Windows support (which
> Vista will have right out of the box). The API support for MinGW is behind
> and it doesn't interface well with the newer parts of Windows because it's
> built on an outdated runtime that still has security issues.

i can't comment here.

> The problem isn't the toolchain provided by the compiler at this point; it
> is that Ruby's toolchain isn't sufficiently cross-platform (a la Perl's
> "perl Makefile.PL" or Python's distutils) and needs to grow up so that you
> don't even have to think about this.

but no one has offered to do this work.  with msys, someone's already done it
for us.  i agree with you to some extent, but this is a matter of expedience
- what do we have now and what are people willing to create now.  taking that
into consideration shows that not one single windows developer has volunteered
for a project like the one you suggest.

> I am also not convinced that everything needs to be compiled with VS2005 to
> make it work; only extensions and those libraries which do not provide an
> alternative to the use of "errno" directly (they should be across API
> calls).

see my post and the one to ruby-core. errno is just one such issue and, since
no one can provide us with a list, we must assume there are more.

regards.

-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama