Compiling Ruby 1.9.1 in MinGW

Question

I tried following the README file in Ruby 1.9.1 but I can't compile it using MinGW in Windows. Can you help me with this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Compiling it in windows is TOO complex because you have a lot of dependencies you need to think of (openssl, zlib, readline, etc).

One thing that helped me is by downloading rubyinstaller (http://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller). It's not that perfect yet but you can tweak some of the configuration files to work for you (i.e. getting the latest build, modifying the versions, etc).

But then since compiling it is just the beginning of my problems (gems that needs native dependencies like rmagick), I ended up using Ubuntu instead.

Answer 2

You might want to download and use the GTK "All in one" bundle (http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html). Althought you won't use gtk, it provides builds with development headers/lib for most of the required libraries.

It will also be easier to cross compile it from a linux/unix system. See this page http://eigenclass.org/hiki/cross+compiling+rcovrt

Last thing, if you want to cross build 1.9.1-p378, this post will be usefull http:// phosphor-escence.blogspot.com/2010/01/install-ruby-191-p378-on-windows-using_22.html