[Rubygems-developers] Binary distribution

[Jim Weirich]

Chad Fowler wrote:
> Any other issues anyone can think of in distributing binaries?

I just want to say that I think that supporting binary gems for the 
Win32 platform is important.  I suspect that most Nubies will be windows 
folks and their expectations are the most stringent of the platforms. 
If a Linux guy needs to twiddle the download a bit before it works, he 
half way expects that.  But I would like to see windows easily supported.

That being said, my main platform is Linux, and I wonder how I am going 
to support binary gems for platforms I don't have.

Regarding source gems ... one of the current problems with source gems 
(with C/C++ code) is that they can be built in different ways (eg. 
setup.rb vs extconf.rb).  Fundamentally, this is a build problem and 
perhaps rake is a better tool than rubygems to attack this problem.  I 
would appreciate feedback in this area as well.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich       jweirich at one.net      http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)