Hi everyone,

sometimes it really frustrates me that it's so difficult to distribute
applications written with Ruby. You hack together something quickly that
works perfectly on your own machine, with all the gems, libraries and
stuff you've installed... then you want to move it.

In my concrete case, I'm writing an offline viewer for Wikipedia dump
files (it's working pretty darn well allready, with repacked files it
gives me 0.2 second load times from inside a packed file with over 2
million objects - 7z just spins for minutes). I want to put the dump
files and this program on a CD / DVD and give it to people, who should
be able to just do put in the CD, and run it straight off the CD (it's a
mongrel server that serves content to localhost), whether it's Windows,
Mac or Linux.

I've tried with rubyscript2exe, which is a great tool, but it fails
currently. I think it is because I'm using two C extensions - mongrel
and the bz2 library. The bz2 is not even a gem, so I don't know how I'd
compile it for Windows. Any good ideas on best practices for
distributing this - ideally so that it can run as a "portable app"
without installation.

Thank you so much
Stian

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