RubyInstaller 1.8.7-p352 released

Ruby
1

Hello!

As you all know, over the years RubyInstaller has replaced the once
known and well loved One-Click Installer. And during that time, we’ve
released versions of RubyInstaller that support Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and
1.9.2.

We’ve worked very closely with Ruby-Core (the developers and
contributors of Ruby) to help ensure that each new version of Ruby
properly supports Windows platforms.

Our goal has always been that RubyInstaller be simple to use, slim,
and upgradeable while providing a balanced set of features normally
used by average Ruby developers and users. While performing this
sometimes difficult balancing act between feature bloat and
usefulness, we’ve removed features that weren’t used, or features that
were not interesting to most people.

But this balancing act has always been somewhat of a problem as some
of these features were advertised in books and older tutorials. This
readily available documentation for the One-Click installer, but not
the RubyInstaller, made it difficult to explain to newcomers why some
of these features were no longer present in the newer RubyInstaller.

One particular feature that has been missing from past RubyInstaller’s
is Tcl/Tk support.

Ruby’s Standard Library includes support for Tk, a cross-platform GUI
library that, when combined with the Tcl scripting language, provides
a basic, yet one of the most ‘stable’ GUI toolkit libraries out there.
The Tcl/Tk library in combination with Ruby’s Tk extension enables you
to quickly and easily write GUI applications in Ruby

Since the first release of RubyInstaller, Tcl/Tk support has been
missing. The requirements for us to be able to integrate Tcl/Tk in an
automated way into our build recipes and while minimizing conflicts
with end-users systems prevented us from delivering Tcl/Tk support in
the past.

Missing Tcl/Tk support has been a long standing issue of
RubyInstaller, until now.

Thanks primarily to the hard work of Boško Ivanišević, RubyInstaller
is now able to build and provide a working Tcl/Tk installation that
meets our basic requirements:

  • It has been automated into our build recipes, ensuring updates can
    be made more easily.
  • It does not interfere with other Tcl/Tk installations you might have
    in your system (e.g. ActiveState’s ActiveTcl)

Following our long standing opt-in policy, you have the ability to
decide if you want to install the Tcl/Tk GUI toolkit or not. Thanks to
Jon Maken’s efforts, the installers now offer you this option on new
installations starting with this 1.8.7 release, and will be part of
future installers such as the upcoming 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 releases. If
you install Ruby using our 7-Zip archives, don’t worry as we’ve also
included Tcl/Tk support in the archives.

Also with this release, we are upgrading RubyInstaller’s Development
Kit to version 4.5.2. Known as ‘DevKit’, it is nothing less than a
stable set of MinGW and MSYS artifacts that provides a compiler
toolchain and others tools to ease the installation of some native
source gems on Windows. The new DevKit is based on TDM’s variant of
GCC.

Last, but not least, we are about to roll out a few more interesting
announcements to the list. Stay tuned for our ‘RubyInstaller Extras’
email :smiley:

OK, onto the Ruby 1.8.7 release…

In combination with the rest of the RubyInstaller team, I’m very
pleased to announce the release of RubyInstaller packages for Ruby
1.8.7-p352

As usual, installer and 7z packages are available at RubyInstaller
website and RubyForge for download:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167

For verification, MD5 signatures of each file released are provided:

a1932b26031576a6d3fd8cf3f23ec312 *ruby-1.8.7-p352-doc-chm.7z
253d57ce56dc819d312edca1129d4b5b *ruby-1.8.7-p352-i386-mingw32.7z
ac56ea30df53bf782c95754b13e296e0 *rubyinstaller-1.8.7-p352.exe

Installer is also digitally signed to avoid alterations and UAC
warnings.

You can read Ruby’s own announcement here:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/385075

= What’s new?

Beyond what is covered by Ruby itself, we have our own set of
improvements:

  • Enhancements:

    • Add support for Tcl/Tk 8.5.10 in recipes, installers, and archives
    • Upgraded Ruby 1.8.7 to patchlevel 352
    • Upgraded RubyGems to 1.7.2 on all versions of Ruby
    • Upgraded rb-readline to version 0.4.0
    • Upgraded OpenSSL to 1.0.0d on all versions of Ruby
    • Build Ruby using GCC 4.5.2 (TDM-1 release)
    • Change from MIT license to Modified BSD License (3-clause)

  • Deprecations:

    • Installers now enforces Windows XP as minimum OS. GH-54