[Win32utils-devel] win32utils with ruby installer

James Tucker
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:09:16 -0000

On 29 Dec 2009, at 18:58, Charley Baker wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>   I''ve been spending a little time delving into the latest Ruby
installer and win32utils, several of which are needed by the  project
I''m working on - Watir. We have requirements for some of the process
libs which need the base apis, etc. It appears currently that we need to do one
of two things - either require the platform (mswin32) or install the devkit to
successfully install and use Watir gems in the current Ruby installer setup. For
development that''s fine, but that''s also the current case for
the enduser.
>
>  For this project are you planning on releasing mingw gems or fat binaries,
I''m trying to gauge what the impact to our users will be. Like I say,
I''ve just started looking at this and would be happy to help with
anything that''s needed, so my questions may be a bit naive as I dive
into this.

There are some big issues here generally. Any library that uses SEH cannot be
compiled with gcc (read: won''t compile under the new ruby installer
builds). AFAIK this directly affects win32-api, and iirc, win32-process,
possibly win32-service too.

You can install the mswin32-60 builds of these, via:

gem install --platform=x86-mswin32-60 win32-api

Obviously this is somewhat of a hacky solution, but one we can''t really
avoid.

As there are no plans globally to make gcc build SEH, and the hacky solutions
don''t tend to work correctly, I would advise that these projects take
the following approach:

1. Build all libs that can be built for mingw, under mingw, using the devkit.
2. Libs that require an MS compiler for SEH, should be built with those, and
binary gems should be released for the mingw platform, using these builds (as
this is ABI compatible, and produces valid code).
3. Where possible, wrap up the above processes via rake-compiler.

I am sure that there are others that might want to weigh in on this, Luis in
particular, but this is the only valid option I know of at this time.

>
>  This also seems to be cross cutting between this project and then the
rubyinstaller in general which should cause a bit of chaos which I''ll
also try to help out with.
>
> -Charley
> Lead Developer - Watir
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