On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, 9:14:42 AM, Travis wrote:

>> Yep.  I'd be very interested to know if cygwin's gcc can be shoehorned
>> to generate Windows-compatible binaries.

> What do you mean Windows-compatible binaries? If you mean ruby extensions,
> then it's trivial to create them using gcc; however, you have to have the
> cygwin ruby installed rather than the one-click installer. Once you have
> cygwin and cygwin/ruby installed, it's just a matter of using extconf.

Sorry, I should have been clearer.  By "Windows-compatible binaries" I
meant compiling extensions that work with the
one-click-Windows-installer, which was compiled with VC++, and is
therefore not compatible with binaries produces by standard Cygwin
gcc.

I do use Cygwin Ruby, so compiling extensions for that is not a
problem.  But Cygwin Ruby can't do everything on Windows (e.g. Fox).
Or if it can, it doesn't seem natural to me to pursue that path.

But since Cygwin is an excellent set of tools and a good Unix-like
interface, if it could be 'shoehorned' into compiling extensions that
work with native-Windows-Ruby, that would be a pleasant solution.

I reckon an equally pleasant solution would be to set up a full mingw
environment, but there's no easy way to do that, especially not
compared with the Cygwin installer, which hopefully Ruby package
managers will look like one day!

Gavin