[Win32utils-devel] win32utils with ruby installer

James Tucker
Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:27:53 -0000

On 31 Dec 2009, at 21:07, Charley Baker wrote:

> Ok, now that I get it, I haven''t checked out the win32utils source
that we''re using, but it sounds like the code is using SEH for some of
the api calls? From some of the threads I''ve been reading, since the
msvc6 libs and the mingw libs should both be compiled against the same version
of the c runtime - msvcrt.dll, then that should theoretically cause problems?
Falsifying the platform sounds a bit dodgy, but will make install easier for
newbs avoiding the platform flag.

They run the same runtime, there shouldn''t be any problems at the ABI
level, luckily, this is actually the purpose of mingw, over something like
cygwin.

> Ideally I still want to say ''gem install watir'' will work
without any machinations, hedging or confusion, that''s the use case.
Anything trickier starts to pile up an already large backlog of user questions
and support.

Yup, this is why my suggestion is that we get gem publish scripts into any of
the win32 project gems that use SEH to publish vs6 flavours with mingw platform
tags. This is the only way, other than somehow factoring out all SEH code, to
make the above work smoothly. The only other possible alternative is to have
them pre-bundled with the one-click, but then users will still end up referring
to docs / this thread to realise they need to upgrade with a --platform=...
force.

> Luis is amazing and a non stop force in making Windows a less than 3rd
class citizen on Ruby, Daniel for that matter as well. :) Given that Watir
started out with Windows and IE as the primary target (still is in many respects
with our user base), it''s been an uphill battle. I''m happy to
help out in any way possible. It''s been a while since Windows
programming was my primary job, but I''m diving into this a bit and hope
to help.

If it''s agreeable to everyone, the aforementioned changes to build and
publish scripts would be quite easy to manage, addressing this problem has been
on my (long) list of things to do for some time now - if someone else has a need
and the time to do it, that''s fantastic.