Newly Supported Build Platforms for FXRuby (Coming Soon)

A long while has passed since the last release of FXRuby (in March 2009) and a couple of new platforms have appeared on the Ruby scene in the meantime. This post provides a brief status update on how support for those platforms is coming along.

One of those platforms is the new MinGW-based Ruby installer for Windows, which is quickly approaching its first release candidate. This is a really exciting development and while it’s not quite yet the official Ruby distribution on Windows, I don’t think that day is far off.

I actually quietly released a MinGW-compatible gem for FXRuby 1.6.19 a month or so ago, but there’s a little problem with it, which is that it’s only compatible with Ruby 1.8.6. If you’re running the MinGW build of Ruby 1.9.1, this gem isn’t going to work for you. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but it is a problem because the RubyGems installation process has no built-in smarts to distinguish between gems that only work with one Ruby version or another. Before someone jumps on that: Yes, I’m aware of the requiredrubyversion attribute for the gem specification. What I mean is, there’s no way to say, “I want to install the FXRuby gem for my platform, but make sure you get the one that was compiled for Ruby 1.9.1 and not the one compiled for Ruby 1.8.6.” The requiredrubyversion attribute seems to only be used to prevent you from installing an incompatible gem–it’s not something that the gems are indexed on.

The recommendation from Luis Lavena of the RubyInstaller project is to build what he calls a “fat” gem (as described here and here), one that includes multiple builds of FXRuby and that selects the “right” one at load time. This will naturally increase the gem’s size, but hey, disk space is cheap and it’s a proven solution to the problem. So I’m looking into this approach now and hope to incorporate it into my build process soon.

Another new platform is Mac OS 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard). For an operating system that’s just a little over a month old, you’d be surprised at how many people are already looking for an FXRuby gem for Snow Leopard. (Well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given the Mac love in the Ruby community). This has been a little tricky because some of the tricks that I’d used in the past to build universal binaries on OS 10.5 (Leopard) didn’t work quite the same way under 10.6, but I think I’ve just solved that. If you’d like to help me test this, you can download a pre-release version of that gem here. Note that this is intended for use that the Ruby 1.8.7 that comes pre-installed with Snow Leopard. If you’ve built your own Ruby (as many folks do), this might work for you too, but if it does that’s just a nice bonus.

Once I’ve resolved the problems involved in supporting these two platforms, I’m planning to release FXRuby version 1.6.20. There won’t be that many functional improvements for those of you already using FXRuby 1.6.19, but it will help to prove out the new build process and re-stabilize things for future releases. I’ve also been doing a lot of work behind the scenes recently (since the move to GitHub) to make it easier for people to hack on FXRuby and contribute code back to the project, but that’s a subject for another post.