Which gem to install on win32?

[E. Mark Ping]

Occasionally, when installing win32-specific gems, I get choices
like the following (I'll use win32-process as an example):

1. win32-process 0.5.3 (ruby)
2. win32-process 0.5.2 (ruby)
3. win32-process 0.5.1 (ruby)
4. win32-process 0.5.0 (mswin32)
5. Skip this gem
6. Cancel installation

So what does the (ruby) vs. (mswin32) tags mean? Of course this is
for win32--it's a win32 extension.

Should I install the latest gem, or the newest mswin32 one? Why is
there even a choice of ruby vs. mswin32?

 

[Daniel Berger]

Occasionally, when installing win32-specific gems, I get choices
like the following (I'll use win32-process as an example):

1. win32-process 0.5.3 (ruby)
2. win32-process 0.5.2 (ruby)
3. win32-process 0.5.1 (ruby)
4. win32-process 0.5.0 (mswin32)
5. Skip this gem
6. Cancel installation

So what does the (ruby) vs. (mswin32) tags mean? Of course this is
for win32--it's a win32 extension.

In this particular case you want #1.

It simply the way I happened to tag the gem when I first built them.
The Win32Utils unofficial rule now is "ruby" either means it's pure
Ruby or ships with a prebuilt binary if it's a C extension, while
"mswin32" means you build from source. It wasn't always this way, so
every once in a while you'll see some inconsistency (#4) in this case.
I think we'll have a better way of tagging these in Rubygems 0.9.5.

Anyway, as a general rule, you want the latest and greatest.

What I would really like is a hook in RubyForge itself that removes
the gem from the index if I mark a given release as 'hidden' so that
the older gems don't show up in the list of choices.

Regards,

Dan