One-Click Installer for Ruby 1.8.7?

[Andreas Warberg]

Hi,

When do you expect to release a one-click installer for ruby 1.8.7 for
the Windows platform? Currently (at
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/) there is still just a one-click
installer for the old version 1.8.6.

You've supplied a binary version of 1.8.7 for Windows, however it
appears to suffer from the same missing dlls (readline.dll, zlib.dll,
...) errors I previously described while testing ruby 1.9.0 on Windows
(http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/154713).

I'm eager to migrate to the new version, however I don't want to commit
to new language features in my codes if installation on Windows is a
hazzle as it obviously will be without the one-click installer.
I might be able to set it up properly on my development machine, however
installation for users and general deployment of the interpreter itself
*must* be a pain-free process (ie. one-click installation).

I hope you will update the one-click installer soon. Ruby is a great
language and Windows should not be left behind as a second class
platform for ruby.

Kind regards,
Andreas

 

[Luis Lavena]

Hi,

When do you expect to release a one-click installer for ruby 1.8.7 for
the Windows platform? Currently (athttp://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/)there is still just a one-click
installer for the old version 1.8.6.

You've supplied a binary version of 1.8.7 for Windows, however it
appears to suffer from the same missing dlls (readline.dll, zlib.dll,
..) errors I previously described while testing ruby 1.9.0 on Windows
(http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/154713).

I'm eager to migrate to the new version, however I don't want to commit
to new language features in my codes if installation on Windows is a
hazzle as it obviously will be without the one-click installer.
I might be able to set it up properly on my development machine, however
installation for users and general deployment of the interpreter itself
*must* be a pain-free process (ie. one-click installation).

I hope you will update the one-click installer soon. Ruby is a great
language and Windows should not be left behind as a second class
platform for ruby.

We appreciate your interest in the language, however, 1.8.7 proven to
be more complex for us since we are migrating One-Click installer from
VC6 to MinGW compiler, which will provide another series of advantages
for our point of view.

The choose to stick to 1.8.6 was a decision made based on several back-
port problems 1.8.7 showed and I couldn't managed get enough free time
to confirm if those got fixed in the final release of it.

Right now you can: Install 1.8.6-26 of One-Click and unpack the 1.8.7
binary on top, which will work most of the cases.

The other is follow up the progress of development with MinGW in the
rubyinstaller-devel mailing list:

http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=167

We can't promise a release date since the change of compiler exposes
other caveats of the solution and platform.

You can find more datails in my blog posts:

http://blog.mmediasys.com/

Regards,

 

[Andreu]

That's bad news for me. I understand it will be easy for developpers,
but the use of Mingw (a great product otherwise) means that Ruby
will be slower and it's use will decline among the windows community.

Andrew.

 

[Luis Lavena]

That's bad news for me. I understand it will be easy for developpers,
but the use of Mingw (a great product otherwise) means that Ruby
will be slower and it's use will decline among the windows community.

Andrew.

Slower? Maybe you're confusing MinGW with Cygwin. MinGW is not a *nix
emulation for Windows, is GCC native version.

Here you have some numbers of latest performance of One-Click
Installer MinGW based:

http://blog.mmediasys.com/2008/04/24/contributions-speedup-and-less-quirks-for-us/

Is 30% faster than VC6 build of ruby, also, more easy to get some
extensions working.

You can also see my post about speed comparison with VC9:

http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubyinstaller-devel/2008-January/000230.html

Regards,

 

[ChessMess]

Any progress on this? We have corporate developers and Ruby is just
getting its foothold in our Enterprise but with the security
vulnerabilities and the lack of an updated installer management is
concerned and it could de-rail the effort.

 

[Roger Pack]

Any progress on this? We have corporate developers and Ruby is just
getting its foothold in our Enterprise but with the security
vulnerabilities and the lack of an updated installer management is
concerned and it could de-rail the effort.

You could roll your own with mingw if you want the latest build. Oh,
except apparently patch 230 is broken, so you might want to wait a
little while.
I suppose you could roll your own with VC6, too, but that might be hard,
since support for it is being deprecated in favor of mingw.
The OCI guys are working on it, but also hesitate to release until the
tests all pass.

-R

 

[Luis Lavena]

Any progress on this? We have corporate developers and Ruby is just
getting its foothold in our Enterprise but with the security
vulnerabilities and the lack of an updated installer management is
concerned and it could de-rail the effort.

Hmn, we are still removing the dust that the security vulnerabilities
generated.

As I commented on mongrel-users:

http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/mongrel-users/2008-June/005446.html

1) 1.8.7 broke lot of things, including wxRuby.
2) wxRuby is a bundled extension and gem of One-Click Installer (which
is also FXRuby).
3) 1.8.6-p230 self tests didn't complete on Windows.
4) as commented by other users, backporting changes across versions is
a hard work (try looking at the commits logs and you will see what I'm
talking about).
5) Even p230 is broken for 1.8.6 itself, not only on Windows, but
across every platform.

So, with all those points, 1.8.7 is not a valid option to provide an
Updated installer, since the work and time involved in test every
single package that is bundled with One-Click Installer distract us
from our task to complete MinGW release.

1.8.6 is plain broken, until someone make it work (and the selfe tests
pass) we will stick to p114 and backport some patches, as we did for
the MinGW version we are working on.

The new version will be Windows Installer Based (MSI) which will play
more nice in corporate environments.

Hope this explains our point of view so far.

Feel free to contribute part of your time and give us a hand to get
the product out of the door faster. we are working pretty hard on this
and breaking our *sses to deliver a good and top quality product.

BTW, we didn't started a pledgie or a contribution collect and even
so, we donate our time to the community. If you have corporate
customers, make them pay for quality service, and you will get it,
trust me.

Regards,