[ANN] Yet another Windows installer

[Phillip Gawlowski]

Hello, list.

I've taken the liberty to submit a new RubyForge project: The Ruby
Widnows Distribution.

Why?
Because there is no easy installable "plain" Ruby package for Windows.

While it is similar to the Ruby One Click Installer, it differs widely
in scope: It will only include RubyGems (for now), to provide a "clean
slate" Ruby distribution.

I don't really need the One-Click Installer anymore, and while it
provides a great starting point and all in one package, it provides more
stuff than I need, I think that others are in a similar position.

Also, the Ruby distribution on garbagecollect[0] is missing some (two,
actually) DLLs to work out of the box. This project intends to fix that
problem, while providing the ease of use of the One Click Installer
(registering extensions, PATH, etc.).

I hope to be able to commit the NSIS installer script and Rakefile to
build the installer ASAP, together with a usable web presence for the
project.

Thank you for your time.

- Phillip Gawlowski

Footnotes:
[0] http://www.garbagecollect.jp/ruby/mswin32/en/download/release.html

 

[James Tucker]

While it is similar to the Ruby One Click Installer, it differs
widely in scope: It will only include RubyGems (for now), to provide
a "clean slate" Ruby distribution.

So presumably that includes zlib in order for rubygems to work, but
would you mind explaining the meaning minimal, or more particularly,
can you tell us which extensions you include in the release at what
versions? Presumably, you're working off of VC 6?

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

So presumably that includes zlib in order for rubygems to work, but
would you mind explaining the meaning minimal, or more particularly, can
you tell us which extensions you include in the release at what
versions? Presumably, you're working off of VC 6?

Only Rubygems at its current release version.

The package will include zlib, and readlines support.

And while I'd love to compile Ruby, it's impossible for me to obtain a
VC6 compiler, so I'll simply grab the Ruby binary off of
garbagecollect.jp (same source as the One Click Installer), add the
needed support, and that's it, more or less.

To sum up:

- Current Ruby release (I'll probably create a Ruby 1.9 package, too)
- Current Rubygems
- zlib, readlines
- An easy to use installer package (file associations, .inputrc for
European users, etc.)

It's possible that it'll include RCov, rake, and/or similar packages
used for development, but not in the first release.

I am, however, open to suggestions as which gems / libraries should be
included in the future.

- Phillip Gawlowski

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

Since my reply seems to have been swallowed, the second try:

So presumably that includes zlib in order for rubygems to work, but
would you mind explaining the meaning minimal, or more particularly, can
you tell us which extensions you include in the release at what
versions? Presumably, you're working off of VC 6?

Only Rubygems at its current release version.

The package will include zlib, and readlines support.

And while I'd love to compile Ruby, it's impossible for me to obtain a
VC6 compiler, so I'll simply grab the Ruby binary off of
garbagecollect.jp (same source as the One Click Installer), add the
needed support, and that's it, more or less.

To sum up:

- Current Ruby release (I'll probably create a Ruby 1.9 package, too)
- Current Rubygems
- zlib, readlines
- An easy to use installer package (file associations, .inputrc for
European users, etc.)

It's possible that it'll include RCov, rake, and/or similar packages
used for development, but not in the first release.

I am, however, open to suggestions as which gems / libraries should be
included in the future.

- Phillip Gawlowski

 

[Roger Pack]

Sounds like it might be useful for those that want a "smaller install"
(I would be one).
You might want to consider joining the Ruby OCI (One Click Installer)
mailing list and bouncing your ideas off them.
If you were able to add your package as an "option" next to the typical
OCI it would get WAY more publicity. I know I would probably download
it.

A couple of thoughts:

What about gettext and openssl packages? Those are...vaguely useful.
And iconv?
You might be able to get a far smaller download if you don't include the
Rdoc stuff, maybe some other stuff.

And while I'd love to compile Ruby, it's impossible for me to obtain a
VC6 compiler, so I'll simply grab the Ruby binary off of
garbagecollect.jp (same source as the One Click Installer), add the
needed support, and that's it, more or less.

If you wanted to live the edge you could compile it with mingw
If you try hard I'm sure you can find a VC6 compiler around.

GL.
-R

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

Sounds like it might be useful for those that want a "smaller install"
(I would be one).
You might want to consider joining the Ruby OCI (One Click Installer)
mailing list and bouncing your ideas off them.

Good point. And one which I didn't consider. D'oh.

If you were able to add your package as an "option" next to the typical
OCI it would get WAY more publicity. I know I would probably download
it.

It'd help, anyway.

A couple of thoughts:

What about gettext and openssl packages? Those are...vaguely useful.
And iconv?

I'll have to look into that, and see if they are included with the Ruby
binary or not.

You might be able to get a far smaller download if you don't include the
Rdoc stuff, maybe some other stuff.

Well, Ruby (just the binaries) weighs in at roughly 10 MB, and the
documentation is well compressed (it being text and all .

I was thinking about slimming Ruby down, though.

If you wanted to live the edge you could compile it with mingw

That's a good idea, and I actually do have a MSYS/MinGW toolchain on
this computer..

If you try hard I'm sure you can find a VC6 compiler around.

At least not on MS's website (well, I could downgrade if I would shell
out for a recent VS2005/8 version, but I'm unwilling to do so..)

- Phillip

 

[Roger Pack]

That's a good idea, and I actually do have a MSYS/MinGW toolchain on

this computer..

Yeah it works and produces (in my opinion) a better ruby...it's just so
edgy that peoples' gems don't use it right :_
right way is
=~ /mswin32|mingw/
so it doesn't work natively with everything

I wonder if you could just rename RUBY_PLATFORM to be mswin32_mingw or
something and then live happy
Take care.
-R

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

Yeah it works and produces (in my opinion) a better ruby...it's just so
edgy that peoples' gems don't use it right :_
right way is
=~ /mswin32|mingw/
so it doesn't work natively with everything

I wonder if you could just rename RUBY_PLATFORM to be mswin32_mingw or
something and then live happy
Take care.
-R

Hm, I'll have to look deeper into GCC than I'd like to find out if that
works.

Theoretically, since my GCC install links against msvcrt.dll, extensions
should still work.

I haven't yet tried to build Ruby myself, however.

Well, I wasn't planning on doing anything on Sunday, anyway.

- Phillip

 

[Roger Pack]

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137507
has some links to an "almost auto" mingw download+compile (basically
it's reduced to a rake task). I'm not sure if he has all the
dependencies linked in, but I think he does.
That would be far better than the painful experience I experienced
getting all the dependencies installed.

(my notes on the process:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Win32MingwInstall)

Hm, I'll have to look deeper into GCC than I'd like to find out if that
works.

Theoretically, since my GCC install links against msvcrt.dll, extensions
should still work.

Yeah the extensions worked for me.

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137507
has some links to an "almost auto" mingw download+compile (basically
it's reduced to a rake task). I'm not sure if he has all the
dependencies linked in, but I think he does.
That would be far better than the painful experience I experienced
getting all the dependencies installed.

(my notes on the process:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Win32MingwInstall)

Ah, that's sure to come in handy. Thanks.

Yeah the extensions worked for me.

That's good news.

Well, I'll go through the info in the links with a fine comb, and find
out how much I'll have to do.

-- Phillip

 

[_why]

What about gettext and openssl packages? Those are...vaguely useful.
And iconv?

Oh oh. (Hand.) A suggestion for doing minimal iconv: use the tml's
iconv lib, which is much smaller on Windows than the normal iconv.
I discovered these while trying to slim down the Shoes distro for
Windows.
<http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies/>

The package is at the bottom (win_iconv_dll-tml) and it is basically
the iconv API backed by the unicode support native to Windows.

_why

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

Oh oh. (Hand.) A suggestion for doing minimal iconv: use the tml's
iconv lib, which is much smaller on Windows than the normal iconv.
I discovered these while trying to slim down the Shoes distro for
Windows.
<http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies/>

The package is at the bottom (win_iconv_dll-tml) and it is basically
the iconv API backed by the unicode support native to Windows.

_why

Great find.

- Phillip Gawlowski

 

[James Tucker]

Only Rubygems at its current release version.

The package will include zlib, and readlines support.

So no openssl :-(

And while I'd love to compile Ruby, it's impossible for me to obtain
a VC6 compiler, so I'll simply grab the Ruby binary off of
garbagecollect.jp (same source as the One Click Installer), add the
needed support, and that's it, more or less.

We managed to pick a copy up off of Amazon less than six months ago.
Take a look

 

[James Tucker]

Oh oh. (Hand.) A suggestion for doing minimal iconv: use the tml's
iconv lib, which is much smaller on Windows than the normal iconv.
I discovered these while trying to slim down the Shoes distro for
Windows.
<http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies/>

The package is at the bottom (win_iconv_dll-tml) and it is basically
the iconv API backed by the unicode support native to Windows.

_why

ooooh, thanks!

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

So no openssl :-(

Oh, it'll include that, too (in fact, all dependencies. I'll just have
to identify them :/).

We managed to pick a copy up off of Amazon less than six months ago.
Take a look

Yeah, the price tag is a bit too high for me.

(IMHO, it might be a great idea to switch to a more recent version of
Visual C all together, considering that the Express Edition is free, and
can produce non-/NET code, but that's just my opinion).

-- Phillip Gawlowski

 

[Jano Svitok]

(IMHO, it might be a great idea to switch to a more recent version of
Visual C all together, considering that the Express Edition is free, and
can produce non-/NET code, but that's just my opinion).

There were many discussions whether One click should use VC6/VC8/mingw
- search the archives.
Now they seem to be investigating the mingw path.

It's relatively easy to build ruby with VC8. One problem is to compile
the extensions (openssl and zlib are mentioned
as hard to compile without autoconf&co, IIRC). Second problem (should
be more or less solved) are binary gems - gems
built for one compiler don't work with ruby built by a different compiler.

BTW, I second to Roger's suggestion: it would be better use of
resources if you join the OCI team. I'd say the majority
of the problems are common to both of you (=compiling the extensions,
compiler decision). Once this is solved, it should be easy
(well... ;-) to add/remove some stuff and use another installer.

 

[Marc Heiler]

To be honest i think it would be better if all those smart Windows guys
come together and also work together.

If there are problems that cant be solved, it would be nice if we here
could somehow help out.

Here is my reasons (it is personal):

I develop/write on Linux. Although I have a few problems with Linux
in some areas, in general Linux is a MUCH better plattform than
Windows as far as I am concerned. Writing ruby is quite easy so
my ruby stuff runs on Windows too (sometimes adapting a few things,
but in general this is a true statement).

Now, when I work with windows, I would like to have the option to
install pretty everything that I want to have on windows (which
normally is a lot). It would be great if I could fine-tune
the install. Also the download size for me does not really matter,
if its 50 mb, 100 mb, 150 mb... about a year ago i bought a 4
gig usb stick, very small, for 31 Euros. I think this is quite
cheap to not really care about the mb size anymore, so features
can go in easily as far as I am concerned
(My personal ruby files are measuring a total of 17 MB files so this
is also not much)

"I don't really need the One-Click Installer anymore, and while it
provides a great starting point and all in one package, it provides more
stuff than I need, I think that others are in a similar position."

I really think the one click installer should be made more modular in
this case. It seems that the windows people are generally unhappy about
various things with Windows, and I understand all the frustration, but
for me
being a lazy windows-user it would be really better if they all get
together and design a compromise which everyone can accept

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

To be honest i think it would be better if all those smart Windows guys
come together and also work together.

If there are problems that cant be solved, it would be nice if we here
could somehow help out.

Here is my reasons (it is personal):

I develop/write on Linux. Although I have a few problems with Linux
in some areas, in general Linux is a MUCH better plattform than
Windows as far as I am concerned. Writing ruby is quite easy so
my ruby stuff runs on Windows too (sometimes adapting a few things,
but in general this is a true statement).

Now, when I work with windows, I would like to have the option to
install pretty everything that I want to have on windows (which
normally is a lot). It would be great if I could fine-tune
the install. Also the download size for me does not really matter,
if its 50 mb, 100 mb, 150 mb... about a year ago i bought a 4
gig usb stick, very small, for 31 Euros. I think this is quite
cheap to not really care about the mb size anymore, so features
can go in easily as far as I am concerned
(My personal ruby files are measuring a total of 17 MB files so this
is also not much)

"I don't really need the One-Click Installer anymore, and while it
provides a great starting point and all in one package, it provides more
stuff than I need, I think that others are in a similar position."

I really think the one click installer should be made more modular in
this case. It seems that the windows people are generally unhappy about
various things with Windows, and I understand all the frustration, but
for me
being a lazy windows-user it would be really better if they all get
together and design a compromise which everyone can accept

Well ... right now there are quite a few ways to run Ruby on the Windows
platform:

1. The One-Click Ruby installer.
2. Instant Rails
3. A package from a vendor whose name I've forgotten that uses an old
version of Ruby and Rails to interface to PostgreSQL.
4. jRuby plus the Java Runtime Environment
5. IronRuby
6. Cygwin
7. "Yet another Windows installer"

As for "a compromise which everyone can accept", I would hope that at
some point, that would be IronRuby, since it comes from Microsoft. I
haven't heard much about the status of IronRuby recently, though.

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

Well ... right now there are quite a few ways to run Ruby on the Windows
platform:

1. The One-Click Ruby installer.
2. Instant Rails
3. A package from a vendor whose name I've forgotten that uses an old
version of Ruby and Rails to interface to PostgreSQL.
4. jRuby plus the Java Runtime Environment
5. IronRuby
6. Cygwin
7. "Yet another Windows installer"

Well, that's less than the Linux distributions in the world.

As for "a compromise which everyone can accept", I would hope that at
some point, that would be IronRuby, since it comes from Microsoft. I
haven't heard much about the status of IronRuby recently, though.

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/03/17/ironruby_work_schedule/

That link has some info on IronRuby's status and schedule.

-- Phillip Gawlowski

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

Well ... right now there are quite a few ways to run Ruby on the Windows
platform:

8. msys/mingw32. Kind of a pain to set up. I hope Luis Lavena's project
continues to make some progress with this. [ruby-talk:286668]