Last month was pretty intense (at least for me), Rubinius, RubySpec, mixed setups and some benchmarks made it a good month. That was 30 days ago, this time I don’t have too much to comment, but please keep reading.

Again, less quirks for us.

Rake and the dread undefined method `exitstatus' for nil:NilClass

Like last month, Gordon Thiesfeld spotted another cross-platform glitch that we traced and reported properly in [ruby-core:16786] (patch more clean here).

The good thing is that got fixed in both 1.9 and upcoming 1.8 releases for us to rejoy.

No more bsdtar extract issues.

It seems the GNUwin32 version of tar cannot handle and extract some packages, like latest OpenSSL. We decided to migrate to 7-Zip with a side effect (a good one): we no longer loose the timestamp of the files due the double file copy process. Yay!

The interface (extract) remains the same for you, but this also fixes some issues while generating WiX packages, which made my day!

So we are open for business for users wanting to contribute fixes for building latest OpenSSL.

Did I mention contribute?, let’s move to the next item in the list then…

Experiments that worth sharing

Experiment #1: GitHub

Abusing of the good will of Logical Awesome dudes and their child GitHub, I decided to put rubyinstaller (_installer3_) code there for you to play with it. feel free to fork it, hack your weirds ideas and then, when you are ready, drop me a pull request (will be honored) :-)

Not only that, but following Rubinius principle, any patch—no matter if it’s 2 lines of code—grant you commit rights to the main repository. Doesn’t sound tempting?

Go for it!

Experiment #2: WiX

Gordon contributed the first recipes to grab WiX toolset (version 3, in beta) that will let us play with the generation of the components for the MSI installer I still owe you guys…

Rest assure I’ll have time to tackle that task soon, keep reading.

Not much free time is good

Last weeks been hectic for me, since I’m not used to travel too much far from home, and even less across the world to Europe (I live in Tucuman, Argentina).

That’s right, I’m moving over to Paris by June and the following months to work a bit lot, but still will try to keep my pace with rubyinstaller and code some stuff to do a proper release of new One-Click Installer (yeah, we all know that a .7z file is not a release).

Guess that’s everything I had in my pockets, my hat and my head to share with you guys. Good luck to those going to RailsConf this year and hope can meet some of you next time!