# A shout out to Michael Letterle (or, zliby saves the day)

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-shout-out-to-michael-letterle-or-zliby-saves-the-day/149769>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 29, 2008, 4:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-shout-out-to-michael-letterle-or-zliby-saves-the-day/149769 "2008-09-29T16:41:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![danielb](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/c57346/32.png) [@danielb](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/danielb)\
**Post date:** [September 29, 2008, 4:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-shout-out-to-michael-letterle-or-zliby-saves-the-day/149769/1 "2008-09-29T16:41:36Z")

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Hi all,

For those of you who build Ruby on Windows manually, but suffered from  
the inability to use rubygems because you couldn’t get zlib to build  
properly, never fear!

Zliby 0.5 is here!

For reasons that are too pathetic to go into here, I recently had to  
rebuild Ruby 1.8.6 from scratch using VC++ 8. This was fine, except  
that it left me without zlib (and openssl, but that’s another topic).  
Since rubygems requires zlib, this was problematic.

Solution? I installed Michael’s “zliby” library (renaming it to  
zlib.rb). Worked like a champ. Installed a couple gems via “gem  
install” without a hitch. The speed seemed fine, too.

Awesome work Michael.

Thanks,

Dan