I''m considering using wxRuby in a project, but the installation procedure seems to be pretty complicated. Can you tell me what users would have to do to use a wxRuby application on *NIX and Windows, assuming that Ruby itself is already available?>From what I understand, Windows users would just have to download the wxRubydistro, which contains everything needed to make it work. The *NIX users would have to download a version of wxWidgets (wxGTK or wxMotif?) and then install wxRuby. Is that approximately right? If so, what can I do to make *NIX installation less painful? Thanks, Bill Atkins
Bill Atkins wrote:> From what I understand, Windows users would just have to download the wxRuby > distro, which contains everything needed to make it work.Yes. When wxRuby is more stable, it might even be included in the Windows Ruby Installer package.> The *NIX users would have to download a version of wxWidgets > (wxGTK or wxMotif?) and then install wxRuby.It''s a bit worse than that, actually: We have not yet built binary packages for Linux. So they have to build it from source. It''s a simple two-step process, but it''s definitely not click-to-install. It is available to gentoo users through their normal emerge installer. I would at least like to provide i386 RPM and DEB packages, which would cover "most" Linux users. But it wouldn''t help unix folk, or Slackware or other tarball-based distros. I may do the DEB myself at some point. Any other *nix packaging would have to be done by a volunteer with access to the target platform. The other promising avenue is rubygems. Curt and I are optimistic that this will be the best way to distribute ruby libraries in the future. We hope to have wxRuby packaged as a gem for our next release. It would probably be a binary gem for Windows and Mac, and a source gem for *nix.> what can I do to make *NIX installation less painful?We could certainly use a volunteer to create DEB and RPM packages for us. Or you could be a pioneer and look into creating and testing source or binary gems for *nix. Until we have one or more of those pieces done, there''s not much that individual wxRuby users can do to make it less painful. Thanks for your interest, Kevin
On Wed, 12 May 2004 19:12:43 -0700, Kevin Smith <wxruby@qualitycode.com> wrote :> It is available to gentoo users through their normal emerge installer. I > would at least like to provide i386 RPM and DEB packages, which would > cover "most" Linux users. But it wouldn''t help unix folk, or Slackware > or other tarball-based distros.I ran into a lot of headaches when trying to provide binary (RPM) releases of FXRuby for Red Hat Linux. Because it''s C++ code (as is wxRuby), you need to be careful about the C++ runtime libraries provided by a particular OS version. That is to say, the C++ application binary interface (ABI) has changed with every new GCC release in recent memory, and different versions of, say, Red Hat, tend to track the latest GCC versions as well. Another reality is that your users will be using every version of Ruby under the sun. I think it''s safe to assume that many people are still running Ruby 1.6.x (have any of the Linux distros updated to Ruby 1.8 for their stable releases yet?) A lot of users will be running one of the Ruby 1.8 or Ruby 1.9 releases that they compiled from a source tarball. And of course there''s the dependencies on the installed wxWidgets version, the installed GTK+ version, etc. although in the end those may be the least of your worries. Although I don''t use Gentoo, I suspect that this is one of those situations where it will shine since the code gets compiled from source. Perhaps it''s a similar situation for operating systems like FreeBSD, where things are a little more controlled (in a good way). I am anxious to see if you guys come up with a workable solution for this problem, so that I mooch off of your idea. Don''t let me down ;) -- Lyle