RubyInstaller packages released.

Last details of RubyInstaller installers itself was sorted out a month ago, but was holding the release because wanted to be 100% sure nothing else breaks. I should have known better, you can never be 100% sure, so decided to stop stalling and release the final versions.

You can find the installers or 7-zip packages at our website in the download section:

http://rubyinstaller.org/

Which BTW, sports the new design from the pledgie, do you like it? (Sure I do)

What to expect?

RubyInstaller team worked providing installers that works seamlessly across different versions of Windows, environments and a bunch of wacky requirements.

A few points:

• Releases for newer version of Ruby will be delivered more often, really.
• You can install RubyInstaller as normal user without requiring administrative rights (good for lock-down computers).
• Installer do not mess with your system or other Ruby installations
• You can safely uninstall it and your gems or customizations will be kept
• It is extremely fast to install
• It is easy to embed in other installers (silent installation mode).

But that’s not all!

Indeed, more stuff is published to RubyForge now: Experimental

Experimental will be the section dedicated to preview or beta version of Ruby. Right now you can find newer 1.9.2-preview3 version, just released a few weeks ago. Ideally, once it hits final, we will provide installers.

In the mean time, you can experiment with it and help Ruby community improve it’s support for Windows.

Please report any Ruby bug from it to Ruby Redmine bug tracker.

What is next?

We haven’t defined a Roadmap for the installers yet. The next target in the queue is 1.9.3, which is been worked in a separate branch since it requires newer libraries been build.

You can checkout this at our repository

Thank you!

Last but not least I personally want to thank all the developers and users that provided feedback about the installer, the building recipes and helped out with support details at the group.

Without them nothing could have been possible!

Feedback or questions?

Just join us at RubyInstaller group and we will happily answer them

What’s new?

Only two new things: STDERR is now redirected (wasn’t before) and the addition of ECHO on/off functionality thanks to Justin Love

How to install?

You can read previous post with installation instructions, since it is a prerelease, please test it and report me any new issue here

Known Issues

AutoSpec is known to have problems, but is not an issue of win32console, as you can read in GH-3

Cheers!

I’ve pushed to RubyGems a version 0.4.beta3, you can access it from here

What’s new?

Bugsfixes, thanks to sinclair that fixed a couple of regressions due the refactoring and removal of win32-service dependency.

Please read the previous post about install and usage instructions. Thank you.

I just pushed to official gem repositories (Gemcutter) the newer version of mongrel_service

What’s new?

A few outstanding bugs has been fixed. A few patches from Daniel Gies and papillon and other stuff:

Removed win32-service dependency

Since win32-service used SEH, something only present in Visual C, newer builds of Ruby made with GCC cannot use it.

This change will make possible to depend on even less external stuff.

Remember: you still need administrative privileges to install or remove Windows Services.

Mongrel log files are written to the path specified by –log option

Yes, log files used to be written all in Ruby bin folder, this has now changed, thanks to Daniel Gies contribution.

This will happen automatically with the upgraded exectuable.

Workaround Windows 2008 process detection

It is now possible execute the service on any account besides LocalSystem. Contribution by Daniel Gies and papillon.

Wait longer for child process terminate properly

There are times some pending database connections are slow. With this change these will terminate smoothly now.

Nitty gritty

I took the time to cleanup the repository, folder structure and build process to make it more easy update this project in the future. Thanks Hoe and my own experience working with Rake.

How to install it?

Since this is a prerelease gem, you need to indicate the option during gem installation:

gem install mongrel_service --prerelease

Once installed, you can now install new services.

If you already have a service installed for your application, you will need to remove it and install it again for it to update the executable and adjust the service registry information.

The expected commands are mongrel_rails service::remove --name MyService and after issue mongrel_rails service::install --name MyService ...

Report bugs

If you find any problem with this newer build, please use GitHub issues since current Mongrel tracker is full of spam.

Please include servicefb.log, mongrel_service.log and mongrel.log generated when attempts to start or stop the service failed.

When to expect a final release

If no serious bug appears, expect a final 0.4 release next weekend.

Thanks all for the contributions and happy new year!

So, just pushed to Gemcutter the prerelease version (_beta1_) so you guys can test with your current Cucumber/RSpec scenarios.

How to install prerelease versions?

All the RubyGems 1.3.x series sport the feature to prerelease gem installations. I recommend update to RubyGems 1.3.5 first in case you haven’t already, and proceed to install the gem:

gem install win32console --prerelease

The process will install version 1.3.0.beta1, which will be automatically available to any require done by Cucumber or RSpec.

What changed on this release?

As I mentioned before, there are a couple of changes required to support 1.9. On this release, I got rid of hardcoded translation tables used to convert codepages from input/output consoles.

How this affects me?

It will only affect you if you use accented characters in the output. If you do, then you should verify that your console codepage supports them. There is more information in the Cucumber wiki troubleshooting page

Now that text is sent transparently to the output, you have the control to feed the stream with different encodings and ensuring the output matches the console codepage.

A working example of this is located here

Please test it out so a formal 1.3.0 release can be done the upcoming days.

Cheers!

JRuby

This new version includes an amazing contribution by Alex Coles that allow compilation and packaging of JRuby extensions and gems!

Yes, it is now possible, under JRuby, to compile JRuby gems that bundle jar files with the extensions.

Even more, with proper tools and a valid JRuby installation, you can even compile extensions from your current 1.8 or 1.9 MRI installation!

Please take a look in the README.rdoc file for more details

Rubinius?

I couldn’t test it myself, but seems that rake-compiler got bundled in latest RC1 of Rubinius. See it for yourself here

Thanks to Rubinius support for Ruby C API and huge reverse engineered mkmf, rake-compiler should work for most of the extensions. Will check that statement later.

So, resistance is futile… the next implementations to be assimilated are MacRuby and MagLev, wanna help me out on that?

What’s next?

At the time I started with rake-compiler, none of the cool tools like Pik or rvm existed.

Because of that, the only way possible to generate fat binaries (mentioned before here) was cross-compiling.

Now that is easy to switch Ruby versions and implementations, it will be possible to implement changes to generate native fat-binaries on any platform.

This functionality is planned, but not ETA yet. Want to help? Fork the project on GitHub and start right now!

I have so cool news to everybody:

MySQL/Ruby support

As I announced 2 months ago, new releases of MySQL gem are going to be build from my repository at GitHub

Please note: only report bugs related to the gem itself, more likely the binary issues. Other type of bugs will be rejected, since this gem is a wrapper around MySQL/Ruby code from Tomita Mashahiro (tmtm)

SQLite3/Ruby bindings

I took the role of maintainer of SQLite3/Ruby project, but I really lack the skills to dig into all the inner details of it.

So, I’m opening the door to anyone with new features, enhancements or bug fixes to fork my clone of the project (here), do your changes and send a pull request.

Both RubyForge Tracker and GitHub pull requests will be honored.

Pure-Ruby Readline (rb-readline)

Released version 0.2.0 a couple of weeks ago, but still is far from perfect.

We are still missing IO redirect and be able to run test_readline.rb test directly.

Roger Pack worked on that, but he also needs some help

Please, fork the project, do your changes and send your pull requests!

Windows Console (win32console) new release soon.

A few patches to improve 1.9 compatibility are under way.

rake-compiler get more audience!

That’s right folks!, rake-compiler now is being used to drive the compile and release process of native gems for DataMapper, FFI and even Thin !

Not too bad for 10 months old tool, ah?

Thanks to all the developers involved in these projects for caring about their products and adding the compatibility for Windows.

More projects listed here … Keep them coming!

Ruby Installer for Windows

Preview and DevKit releases has been moved to RubyForge

While our preview concept is quite stable, we are working on getting it better

Got my certificates to deliver signed installers, how cool is that?

Still alive an kicking

If you think I’m quiet, please join us at RubyInstaller Google Group, will find out that I talk more there than here

This version is mainly a bug fixing release:

• Accept ‘cygwin’ as valid terminal [rogerdpack]
• Accept ‘dumb’ as valid terminal. Closes GH-7
• Fix crash when performing reverse look search. Closes GH-6

Install instructions

1. Download rb-readline-0.2.0.zip from GitHub downloads
2. Extract to a folder and open a command prompt there (or cd into it)
3. Execute ruby setup.rb

That should update the installed rb-readline. Just to verify, execute the following in the command prompt:

ruby -rreadline -e "puts Readline::RB_READLINE_VERSION"

The output should say 0.2.0

More to come

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements, we are cooking RC for RubyInstaller! And at the same time, updated website, more documentation at the Wiki and of course, tutorials full of success!

Please join us at RubyInstaller Google Group and share your questions or issues!

This release is based on my GitHub fork from original Kevin Williams work.

For those who are not aware, Kevin’s gem is a Gem package of tmtm mysql-ruby bindings at RubyForge

Changes

This started to improve GCC support, but it ended with a take over and better packing to improve both Windows support and Ruby 1.9 compatibility.

You can read more details of this release here

This release is a fat-binary release, meaning it will work with both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.

Importance of MySQL version

As I stated over a previous tutorial the version of MySQL is important.

The binary version has been built against MySQL 5.0.83, which means will be compatible with 5.0 series, but not 5.1

Moving forward

This gem is a repackage of tmtm’s work, and improved testing functionality, packaging and build process. On this project, contrary to SQLite3/Ruby bindings, we are tied to tmtm’s version (link provided above).

Please report issues when installing from source, but most of the usage ones (related to new features and bug fixes) should be addressed to tmtm project at RubyForge.

Once tmtm releases new versions, I’m going to package those into an updated gem version for us to rejoice.

Installation

Since on previous tutorial I provided a mysql gem version 2.8.1.1

gem uninstall mysql --version 2.8.1.1
gem install mysql --source http://gems.rubyforge.org

To be able to install the RubyForge version, please uninstall the older first.

Apologizes for this, going to remove the RubyInstaller version soon.

That’s it, enjoy!, now I need to take a plane!

This time, it came with lot of surprises, keep reading if you want to know.

From where I can grab this?

Good question, let me point you:

http://rubyinstaller.org

No, is not the Coming soon placeholder we had, it is fresh

What contains these new installers?

Let’s see over RubyForge release notes for Technology Preview2

Bundles Core and Standard Library documentation as CHM.

Yes, now you have a searchable and Windows-friendly version of the documentation, even with embed source code, so you can check it even offline.

Bundles The Book of Ruby.

Previous installers provided Programming Ruby book, and while we appreciate it, references to the language had changed a bit since it’s release (was first edition).

Now, Courtesy of Huw Collingbourne from SapphireSteel, people can enjoy the book. The only bummer is that requires PDF, but you can go with fat Adobe Reader or slim FoxIt Reader

Upgraded RubyGems

Both 1.8 and 1.9 packages contains latest version of RubyGems, which you could manually do, anyway

Bugfixes

Of course, we always fix bugs on every release, and if we don’t have one, we fake them

Where to ask questions?

Pleased to announce the new group at Google Groups.

Feel free to join us. First message is going to be moderated but not because we censor what you say, but because of spam (we like you)

What’s next?

There are still some pending things in the TODO

And you can see we got more contributors feel free to contribute you too!

Still questions?

Please check the FAQ over GitHub

Thanks

A huge thank you to everybody that contributed with patches, suggestions, bug reports, content and design!