Rubyinstaller devel - Mar 2008 - Bootstrapping Ruby with MinGW: selfhosted and test sandbox!

Hello List,

I''m happy to announce that huge progress (hack-a-ton) was made this
weekend to bring a new implementation of One-Click Installer for
Windows!

This test version is based on the rake recipes I commented on previous
posts [1], and it download MinGW, MSYS and some Ruby dependencies to
get a working Ruby implementation using MinGW (i386-mingw32 platform).

I''ve packaged Ruby 1.8.6 (revision 15830) as 7zip package (2.7MB). You
can download it form the following URL:

http://dump.mmediasys.com/installer3/

The project and the recipes code can be downloaded from here:

http://code.mmediasys.com/installer3/latest.zip

I''ll like to point a few things before everyone start using this ruby
version:

THIS BUILD OF RUBY IS *NOT* READY FOR PRODUCTION. USE IT ONLY FOR
TESTING PURPOSES.

All the enhancements got here will be injected back in the new version
of One-Click Installer for Windows.

Caveats:

1) Pre-built gems for i386-mswin32 are not compatible with this build
of ruby. You''ll require to download sources of your favorite gems.

If you haven''t created the sandbox environment using the recipes, you
can grab the baked mingw+msys sandbox from installer3 URL. You need to
put MinGW binaries and MSYS binaries in the PATH (in that order)
before firing the gem install or any build procedure.

2) Don''t expect Rails, Mongrel, Merb, Sqlite3 or "name your
favorite
gem" will work with this release out of the box (hey, this is not even
a release!).

3) The package contains the bare minimum stuff to serve as self
hosting environment:

Ruby 1.8.6
Zlib 1.2.3
OpenSSL 0.9.7c
Readline 5.2
Iconv alternative
RubyGems 1.0.1

Nothing more, nothing less.

4) Readline is still broken. I removed the readline tests from the
check procedure to continue working on this (was stuck for two months
without feedback). If you wanna help, search for my previous posts
about this issue.

For CI information:
1760 tests, 1343436 assertions, 2 failures, 0 errors

5) GNU Utils are a nightmare to get it working or find proper builds
for Windows. following _why advice [2], opted for win_iconv which
seems working (but there aren''t tests for it).

6) Microsoft Installer (MSI) recipes are still missing. Future
releases will be use WiX tools and will provide patches between
releases.

7) Contributions are highly welcome! I''m using Bazaar as VCS since
Windows support for Git (the new cool tool) is still behind...

Remember: everything shown here will became part of the next One-Click
Installer. As you can see, I''m trying to keep it to the minimum. Later
we can discuss "addons" or different versions that are target
different usage scenarios.

Check my blog [2] for upcoming hack-a-ton dates and keep an eye on
#ruby-lang if you wanna help ;-)

Regards and everybody have a nice week!

[1]
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google/browse_thread/thread/1e2f1b9a3d611e3b/
[2] http://blog.mmediasys.com
-- 
Luis Lavena
Multimedia systems
-
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from
the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent
disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

Hi Luis!

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Luis Lavena <luislavena at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> I''m happy to announce that huge progress (hack-a-ton) was made
this
> weekend to bring a new implementation of One-Click Installer for
> Windows!
Great news!
>
> This test version is based on the rake recipes I commented on previous
> posts [1], and it download MinGW, MSYS and some Ruby dependencies to
> get a working Ruby implementation using MinGW (i386-mingw32 platform).
>
>
> Caveats:
>
> 1) Pre-built gems for i386-mswin32 are not compatible with this build
> of ruby. You''ll require to download sources of your favorite gems.
Ouch.  I misunderstood that MinGW used the same run-time as vc6.
>
> If you haven''t created the sandbox environment using the recipes,
you
> can grab the baked mingw+msys sandbox from installer3 URL. You need to
I just want to add my "good job" here as someone who appreciates what
you''re doing, but has been too quiet about it (and too busy to
contribute).

--
Joe

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:59 PM, Joe Swatosh <joe.swatosh at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi Luis!
>
Hey there Joe ;-)
>
>  On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Luis Lavena <luislavena at
gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Caveats:
>  >
>  > 1) Pre-built gems for i386-mswin32 are not compatible with this build
>  > of ruby. You''ll require to download sources of your favorite
gems.
>
>  Ouch.  I misunderstood that MinGW used the same run-time as vc6.
>
Both link to MSVCRT runtime DLL version, but the platforms signatures
(or the ''arch'' used by ruby to identify them) differs. So
i386-mswin32
gems will not be valid ''as gems'' for i386-mingw32

Also, I found there are a few issues between the generated
msvcrt-ruby18.dll by MinGW and extensions compiled with VC6, even both
link to the same DLL and the same CRT, sometimes they crash. I can
point to issues under C and low level stuff down there that differ
between implementation.

In any case, I set as next step configure a CI for some of the OSS
project that will be "supported" by me, like Mongrel and others which
right now provide better support for Windows than others.

Ruby developers willing to bring Windows love to their projects are
welcome to mail me and request some slice into the CI system we (my
company) have.
>
>  I just want to add my "good job" here as someone who appreciates
what
>  you''re doing, but has been too quiet about it (and too busy to
>  contribute).
>
Thank you, I really appreciate the kind words and the encourage a few
users sent me directly :-)

It''s been difficult times and the task is not easy, and still lot of
work need to be done, but I think we are in the right path.

Regards and have a nice week!
-- 
Luis Lavena
Multimedia systems
-
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from
the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent
disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams