Abhijit Speaks :

I was beginning with a new web app, so I thought I’d give ‘merb’ a try. Sometimes, you just don’t choose the right thing. So I started dutifuly as one starts in the ruby world with

‘gem install merb’

perhaps that was not a very sensible thing to do. It started downloading and installing gems that it felt necessary. Things were moving fine till it came to a gem ‘dm-types’, which had  a depenedency on ‘bcrypt-ruby’. Frankly so far I was not paying attention to what was happening inside… simplying hitting enter like a layman. To install bcrypt-ruby, the native extension needs to be built. To build that native extension, I hit the error ‘nmake’ not found. Thankfully, I had visual studio installed, so when I appended the necessary path to the path environment variable, I moved a step forward when it spit out a million errors. This got resolved when i found “patch” for bcrypt-ruby for windows. This is when i thought I am almost there. Thats when my luck hit a roadblock where I hit upon the “MSC_VERSION unmatch” error. Basically, my native ‘ruby’ was compiled for visual studio 6 and such ruby does not like extensions built using other versions of Visual Studio due to MSVCRT dependencies. Perhaps I could have commented those lines and moved ahead, but didn’t do that. It seems people have done it for other projects when they encountered this problem.

I decided, lets work around this by building the bcrypt-ruby using ‘mingw’, no need to explain, this did not work either. Then back to googling again to find a version of ruby that was built for mingw. Thats when I found a lot of work that is done by luis lavena around this and could finally find a git repository where the sources for installer were there.  Unfortunately for me, all the installation process was built using rake. I had never paid serious attention to rake before. So this means learning ‘rake’ (atleast a little bit)  so as to understand whats happening inside. This basically downloads mingw/msys/ruby and a bunch of other dependencies and builds ruby.

Like previous things this did not work out of the box, I hit upon a nasty ’sourceforge redirect bug’. Basically, it is a side-effect of sourceforge’s smart mirror redirecting. What happens is – if you request a file on a sourceforge that doesn’t exist, sourceforge redirects it to next mirror using HTTP 302 and then next and next, this goes to a point where the number of file descriptors limit is reached. The way around that was to figure out the ‘exact names’ of the msys latest files. So finally managed to download all the required files that were required to build and went a step further.(This experience tells me that downolading msys/mingw as a part of building ruby isn’t perhaps the best choice)

When I started building ruby inside this the Win32API extension won’t built ‘cos the new ‘mingw make (3.81)’ did not like the windows style paths (C:\something\something). Previous versions of make would still build the Win32API and other APIs.  Thankfully there was a patch to mkmf.rb that fixed this problem and I could build ruby using mingw. The next step was to actually create the ruby installer. Luis’s package contains two installers one for the rubt runtime and one for the ruby devkit. Creating a working ‘devkit installer’ is not going to work because there are references to few gnu utilities hardcoded in the ‘wix config file’. However I could manage to create the runtime installer and install the ‘mingw-ruby’ on my windows.(I’d not get into the details of Paraffin and other paraphernalia thats required to get started with Windows wix, for I understand nothing of that)

Ofcourse then irb would break because it doesn’t like the “RUBYOPT” environment variable set by ‘original windows ruby’. Unsetting this finally, I came to a point where I could again do a “gem install merb”. I was really curious to find out whether I could really build the bcrypt-ruby. However, I didn’t even reach that far when my do_sqlite3 build failed due to a header not found (looks like I need to install some devel library for that). This when I hit the ’stop loss’. ‘cos I realised this path is fraught with danger. Because I have no idea where I will hit the next road block.

Now, I am going to relook at the whole exercise again. Possible choices are -

1. To build ruby for mingw from scratch (like without having the native mswin32 ruby) and go step by step installing all the components of the merb stack. But then I don’t know for how many components the native components will have to be built?

2, To explore whether the new one click ruby installer is built with Visual Studio Express (and then simply build the bcrypt-ruby with windows patch and move on)

3. To just get the basic merb stuff that is required for me to get started continue working on the web app and in parallel perform #1 above.

Right now undecided about which path to take, perhaps I’d take option #3 above, if it turns out that #2 is not the best choice. For now this has got ‘reniced’ to a lower priority.

Perhaps there’s still an easier way out somewher, which I have not figured out yet. Hopefully I will.