So, I think this may be good news for some folks.
February 24, 2009 is the date that Jamis Buck marked as the end of several of his open source projects, including SQLite3/Ruby. (you can read the post here)
Previously, he asked for help updating SQLite3/Ruby to make it work on Windows.
That sad news left a lot of us with a bad taste, and very unhappy, not because we no longer will have someone to complain at, but because he no longer enjoyed working on those projects.
Over the past months I’ve been improving rake-compiler to be able to catch most of the building issues of several projects, including my own (I love to scratch my own itch).
As you have noticed on my “getting started with Rails and SQLite3″: http://blog.mmediasys.com/2009/07/06/getting-started-with-rails-and-sqlite3/ post, I successfully built, installed and used a SQLite3/Ruby gem on Windows.
The next question was, what to do? The work to get all those lovely gems was there, initial 1.9 was there, but was not official
While SQLite3/Ruby being the de-facto for getting started with Rails, we couldn’t let it die.
Enough words, sent some emails to Jamis and now I can publish those gems to RubyForge.
What all that babbling means?
This means:
- My fork at GitHub is the new mainstream for the releases
- I’m going to go over the open bugs and tickets and asses validity and relevancy based on work that was already done in my fork.
- The release cycle has been improved and almost automated. It can be performed from Windows, Linux or OSX, even using latter to create Windows native gems.
Now, what happens with new features:
- Pull requests with patches and bug fixes are going to be accepted.
- New features will be evaluated as long they don’t impose structural changes and carry with them tests cases.
- Patches that improve Ruby 1.9 compatibility are highly appreciated.
I don’t have strong knowledge of all the internals of this tool, so don’t expect earth breaking changes from me, except ensuring stability.
I hope this is good news to everybody. Now I’m going to stalk MySQL binding author and get permission to push those lovely gems 
Cheers everybody!
Congrats, and thanks Luis! I couldn’t think of a better person for this job.
Thank you! As usual you are easing the pain of hundreds of Windows users. Hope you have time to embrace even more open source projects
Thank you Norman and Fabio for your kind words!
@Fabio: There was a wise man that said:
I’m aiming for that
Thanks for stepping up, and for those lovely hints you gave me earlier; I think I even understand them now. The fishing approach indeed works wonders
It’s great to see somebody as engaged and competent as you takes these things into your own hands and eases the life of every single Windows/Ruby user out there.
Awesome news – you’re a true star. Thank goodness some people in the Ruby community still see Windows as a relevant OS.
Luis, any idea how long it will take before we can run Mongrel? As a newbie of Rails, access to an easy way of seeing the results, are kind of important…
Anyway keep up the good work!
Hey Cane, kind of off-topic on this post, but to answer you, a Mongrel version that works on MinGW is on gems.rubyinstaller.org
Working on a more official release, of course.
Cheers.
@Luis:
I know, but I wasn’t sure if you keep an eye out for new comments on old posts…
[...] (Via DEV_MEM.dump_to(:blog) – Multimedia systems blog.) Original Link: Stepping up as SQLite3/Ruby maintainer [...]
Luis, one thing I was thinking. If I install the mingw32 preview version of your Ruby Installer, I won’t be able to use any of the VC compiled gems, right? They still need to be recompiled into fat binaries for mingw?
Talking about 1.8 version of Ruby, in theory you can force the platform, but there are certain gems that do some weird platform checks, those I guess will not. Fat binaries are for 1.8 and 1.9 support form the same gem.
Sorry not making myself clear