I just installed the latest distro prepared by Andrew, and
all went fine. To get it to run under bash, I just renamed
the shipped cygwin1.dll to *.old, and ruby.exe seems happy
to use my newer cygwin dll, as was suggested in this NG.

But then I noticed one of my scripts was running twice as
fast as it did before. Quite a dramatic improvement!
The former execution times were obtained with a mingw buid
(ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [i586-mswin32]), whereas the pragmatic
packaging bundles (ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [i386-cygwin]).
Same ruby version/subversion, thus.

I was wondering whether someone has an explanation for this...
I'm running W2K on an AMD Duron box. Could that defeat the
i586-specific optimisations? Or maybe the mingw maintainer
has inadvertently released an unoptimized exe?

I had actually finished porting a perl script to ruby, but
felt unhappy about the fourfold execution time increase. Now
it's only twice slower... Granted, it's also about 2 times
more readable!

Regards,

Bernard.