Forum: Redcloth RedCloth + Ruby installer 1.9.2p0

Hi,

We are using RedCloth to provide note formatting inside an open source
project called the Dradis Framework [i] and [ii]. This is a Rails-based
application that end users install in their computers.

What we have done in the past is including RedCloth's binary .gem into
the Dradis installer and that has worked out perfectly.

However, we are looking into upgrading Dradis to Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2.
Unfortunately, we are running into some issues in Windows with the Ruby
Installer (1.9.2p0) and the binary version of RedCloth
(RedCloth-4.2.2-x86-mswin32-60.gem). It installs ok but then fails when
trying to load 'msvcrt-ruby18.dll'.

I have successfully used DevKit to compile and use RedCloth 4.2.3 in a
test system, but I would like to be able to create a Ruby Installer
compatible binary gem to distribute it with the installer (thus removing
the extra dependency on DevKit for end users). Is this possible? What is
the best way to do this?

Going to the gem folder
(C:\Ruby192\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\RedCloth-4.2.3) and running rake
fails with a "no such file to load" error. After tweaking the Rakefile
and running 'rake mingw compile' also fails [iii].

Can anyone give me a hand to figure out what is going on?

Many thanks,
Daniel


[i]
http://dradisframework.org/

[ii]
http://dradisframework.org/images/screenshot/v2.5/...

[iii]
http://pastie.org/1311243

> However, we are looking into upgrading Dradis to Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2.
> Unfortunately, we are running into some issues in Windows with the Ruby
> Installer (1.9.2p0) and the binary version of RedCloth
> (RedCloth-4.2.2-x86-mswin32-60.gem). It installs ok but then fails when
> trying to load 'msvcrt-ruby18.dll'.

Hi Daniel,

One of the problems that you found was that the RedCloth binary gem was 
only built to support Ruby 1.8.  RedCloth would need to provide a 
version of its native .so library linked against the Ruby 1.9 DLL in 
order to run correctly under Ruby 1.9.x.


> I have successfully used DevKit to compile and use RedCloth 4.2.3 in a
> test system, but I would like to be able to create a Ruby Installer
> compatible binary gem to distribute it with the installer (thus removing
> the extra dependency on DevKit for end users). Is this possible? What is
> the best way to do this?

It's possible by creating what many call a "fat binary" gem.

A fat gem is basically one that includes a version of their native 
library linked against 1.8 and a version linked against 1.9, both in the 
same gem.  At runtime, the gems code determines what Ruby version it's 
running under and loads the correct native library.

Two well known libraries that do this are 
https://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri and 
https://github.com/luislavena/sqlite3-ruby

I believe the authors of these mingw binary fat gems build them on Linux 
or OSX using the tool https://github.com/luislavena/rake-compiler which 
makes it easy for *nix-based gem authors to provide fat binary gems for 
their Windows users.

It would be great to have a fat binary RedCloth :)

If you have any questions on the rake-compiler tool after you check it 
out, search our group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyinstaller 
and if you can't find anything that helps, post a question.  Luis 
(author of rake-compiler) can point you in the right direction.

Jon

Daniel,  I've been hard at work the last couple weeks on RedCloth.  Give 
the
master <https://github.com/jgarber/redcloth> a try and let me know how 
it
goes.  You'll need rake-compiler to cross-compile the fat binary like 
Jon
mentioned.  There is a very specific version of Ruby you need to make it
work (1.9.1-p243), so use rvm as well.  rake gems:build should take care 
of
everything, then.

Thanks for giving it a test run.  I'm hoping to release it soon if I can 
get
a Java expert to help me fix the JRuby whitespace problem.

Jason

Thanks Jon and Jason,

After some tweaks I was able to get the gem cross-compiled (from 
master).

First thing I had to do was amend the Rakefile to include after
'rake/clean' the following:

require 'rake/gempackagetask'

Otherwise I would get an error running rake.

After that I installed ragel, rake-compiler, mingw32 and got that up and
running.

Running rake gems:build also worked. It created a lib/redcloth_scan.so
and lib/1.9/redcloth_scan.so and a pkg/redcloth-4.2.3.gem

Unfortunately this .gem didn't contain any of the .so files. Copying the
gem across to the Windows box would install Ok but then fail when
requiring 'redcloth' with:

no such file to load -- 1.9/redcloth_scan

So I copied the 1.9/ folder to by windows <rubygems\redcloth> path and
it worked like a charm.

I guess that there is some tweaking around to be made in the gemspec to
ensure that the .so files are included in the gem file.

Is this an easy fix? I'm asking because I've never distributed a Gem
myself and I was thinking that probably someone with more experience
will spot the issue more quickly.

Many thanks for your help,
Daniel

Daniel,
I've fixed the README to include instructions about bundler and rvm and
fixed the gem build tasks to include the proper files.  I tested it on 
Ruby
installer 1.9.2p0.

You can try it out by pulling the latest from master or use the 
pre-compiled
one I pushed up to rubygems.org with rake install RedCloth --pre

Let me know how it goes!
Jason

Hi Jason,

This worked. I didn't have to touch the Rake file and the .so files were
included in the gem. The gem ran flawlessly on the Windows box.

Many thanks for your support on getting this up and running.

The only thing I had to tweak was to comment out tasks/gems.rake#18

rvm ruby-1.8.6-p398@redcloth rake cross compile RUBY_CC_VERSION=1.8.6

This is because my rake-compiler only had support for 1.9.1 but that is
more specific to my case.

I reckon that the hole rake-compiler business is a bit messy for people
not familiar with it so maybe adding a couple of basic steps in the
README will help people out. Something along the lines of what you have
when running rake build:win if rake-compiler is not properly configured.
Or maybe a wiki page in GitHub on how to get everything up and running
for cross-compilation (and a reference to it in the README).

Let me know if you need a hand with documentation, I'm more than happy
to spend some time putting that together if you think it would be of
use. Otherwise I may just write a blog post so I have it for myself in
case I need to run through this again.

Anyways, thank you very much for your time,

Daniel

Great!  The thing with not having 1.8.6 installed for rake-compiler is
because a warning message that you don't have it installed only shows up
when you don't have *any* rubies installed for rake-compiler.  Thus, you
didn't see it.

I added it to the compile steps in the README per your suggestion. 
Thanks!
 That should save people a lot of trouble.

Best,
Jason