Ruby Standard Environment

[Don Norcott]

I am running windows XP professional with Ruby 1.92. I have a Ruby
project that requires mechanize, nokogiri, rest-open-uri.

It fills in a web-page search form, walks the returned web-pages
sequentially and extracts string data. Other than perhaps for additional
HTML handling or string processing I do not see an immediate need or
other Rubygems.

But I would like to know what gems people have loaded for a typical
install. Also there appear to be many versions (slightly different
names) of some of the gems and it would take hours trying to determine
which version is most suitable. Is there a recommended list of gems to
install or at least specific to operating system (on XP in my case)

I have these gems installed

hpricot (0.8.2) probably no longer needed (nokogiri)
mechanize (1.0.0)
minitest (1.6.0)
nokogiri (1.4.3.1 x86-mingw32)
rake (0.8.7)
rdoc (2.5.8)
rdoc-data (2.5.3)
rest-open-uri (1.0.0)
scrapi (1.2.0) prob will not use
scrubyt (0.4.06) prob will not use
tidy (1.1.2)

I am sure there are many gems I could benefit from if I knew what they
were. What other gems would typically be installed and what packages
are installed by other than a gem install (download windows binaries).

One of the reasons I am asking is that a gem I wanted to install
required libxml2. I Installed libxml-ruby (1.1.4 ruby x86-mswin32-60)
and the install process determined that zlib was missing (suspect a few
others as well) When I looked at the libxml2 make file it appeared to
be for a ruby 1.8 install.

I then did some digging around and found dll,lib and header files
available pre-built. Rather than installing the gem and this appears to
be the route for me to take (but how would I know the gem build was for
1.8? without looking at the make file or is this is fine for 1.92 as
well)

I am thinking of perhaps uninstalling and re-installing Ruby mostly to
get a better directory structure. Should I perhaps be dropping back to
Ruby 1.8 for better compatibility?.

Thanks Don

 

[Quintus]

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Am 15.10.2010 20:40, schrieb Don Norcott:

But I would like to know what gems people have loaded for a typical
install.

I think which gems one has installed depends on which are needed. I just
have very few gems I always install ontop of a new Ruby installation,
the others come when they are needed. They usual way is to query
Rubygems.org's search function with a topic and pick one of the
resulting gems.
The few gems I usually install are these ones:

* hanna: I really hate that standard Darkfish output. hanna looks much
nicer (and I hope it will be updated sometime...)
* RedCloth: I write many things in Textile and format the resulting HTML.
* coderay: When I write about coding, I need a powerful syntax highlighter.
* redcar: Programming editor
* test-unit: Yeah, I'm still using it...
* term-ansicolor: For colored console output (works on windows only in
combination with win32-console)
* wxruby-ruby19: For GUI development

But as I'm developing many different things, the number of installed
gems grows and currently I have 30 gems installed. The most ones are
dependencies of other gems, though.

I am sure there are many gems I could benefit from if I knew what they
were. What other gems would typically be installed and what packages
are installed by other than a gem install (download windows binaries).

Nearly every piece of Ruby library software is available as a gem. On
Windows, you should install the RubyInstaller Devkit to get access to
all of them.
Beside gems, I only download a C extension's external dependencies for
Ruby.

One of the reasons I am asking is that a gem I wanted to install
required libxml2. I Installed libxml-ruby (1.1.4 ruby x86-mswin32-60)
and the install process determined that zlib was missing (suspect a few
others as well) When I looked at the libxml2 make file it appeared to
be for a ruby 1.8 install.

zlib shouldn't be missing. Where did you get your Ruby from? The
standard RubyInstaller ( http://rubyinstaller.org ) ships with zlib
precompiled for Windows.

I then did some digging around and found dll,lib and header files
available pre-built. Rather than installing the gem and this appears to
be the route for me to take (but how would I know the gem build was for
1.8? without looking at the make file or is this is fine for 1.92 as
well)


I am thinking of perhaps uninstalling and re-installing Ruby mostly to
get a better directory structure. Should I perhaps be dropping back to
Ruby 1.8 for better compatibility?.

Although I mainly work on my Ubuntu Linux system, 1.9.2-p0 works fine
for me on Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bits.
As I asked above: Where did you get your Ruby from? The mswin32-build is
not the normal way to go on Windows anymore, switch to the mingw32 build
from the RubyInstaller team.

Thanks Don

Vale,
Marvin
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[Stuart Ellis]

I agree with Quintus - to run the standard implementation of Ruby on =
Windows painlessly, use RubyInstaller with the DevKit added.

As far as standard gems go, I now use Bundler for every project - the =
Bundler gem facility builds a good minimal project structure, and the =
dependency management quickly becomes a time saver as the project grows. =
It plays well with Git branches, so you can even have different =
dependencies for different branches of your project.

 

[Don Norcott]

I no longer know where I got my Ruby install from, just followed
recommendations I found on line. When I attempted to find out where my
download came from, I found i had ruby-1.9.2-p0-i386-mingw32 sitting on
my machine. Also found "rubyinstaller-1.9.2-p0.exe" which looks to be
same. So looks like this is what I was about to install when something
I found that changed my mind.

If I uninstall, is the uninstaller provided with Ruby sufficient or are
there other areas (registry, etc) to be looked at before re-installing.

 

[Quintus]

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Am 16.10.2010 00:43, schrieb Don Norcott:

I no longer know where I got my Ruby install from, just followed
recommendations I found on line. When I attempted to find out where my
download came from, I found i had ruby-1.9.2-p0-i386-mingw32 sitting on
my machine. Also found "rubyinstaller-1.9.2-p0.exe" which looks to be
same. So looks like this is what I was about to install when something
I found that changed my mind.

If I uninstall, is the uninstaller provided with Ruby sufficient or are
there other areas (registry, etc) to be looked at before re-installing.

I suppose you got your mswin32-Ruby from ruby-lang.org as a simple ZIP
file. Removing the mswin32-Ruby's directory should be enough to
uninstall it as no registry keys are set.
If you want to uninstall a Ruby the RubyInstaller installed, there
should be an uninstall option for it as for any other program. However,
I don't think the RubyInstaller sets any Registry keys, so just deleting
the installation directory should be fairly safe.

Vale,
Marvin
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