Currently the IronRuby git repo has copied versions of irb.bat,
rdoc.bat, etc checked in as iirb, irdoc, etc to give shortcuts to
running these popular Ruby utility scripts from IronRuby just as you do
from Ruby.
http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/tree/8d70f2bf7a2bae37ae7cb3ba5d3eca5fe54d46e1/Merlin/Main/Languages/Ruby/Scripts/bin.
They currently aren’t copied to the build location, so you’ll have to
add this path to your PATH to call them.
Is anyone opposed to having dev.bat add Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug and
Merlin/Main/Bin/Release to the path, and have a post-build step copy the
necessary bat files (irdoc, iri, iirb, igem) to the build directory?
This means no adding anything to the PATH; just run dev.bat and “brbr”,
and then “ir.exe” will resolve to Merlin/Main/Bin/Release/ir.exe. There
might be a good reason for it, but having things on the PATH is pretty
standard. =P
FYI, these executable scripts don’t just originate from Ruby itself …
libraries and gems can install them as well, as rubygems, rails, rake,
rack, and a ton other libraries do. IronRuby provides some of these
files as well (irails, igem) since they hardcode “ruby.exe” in the bat
files (actually, that’s how it used to be, might have changed now that
jruby is around), but it can never provide all of them. Ideally all gems
that drop an executable next to “ir.exe” will check the ruby executable
name (found in rbconfig.rb) and generate the bat file correctly.
The reason I’d like to only look for ir.exe in the build directories is
that each bat files has some special logic to check to see if it’s
running in the development environment, and if so run
Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ir.exe. While this is limiting since you can’t
easily use a release build, it also will be busted for any library that
installs itself correctly.
~Jimmy