Where to get required/recommended dll's on win32

Ruby
#1

Hi. I’m wanting to try out ruby 1.8.5 preview2 on microsoft windows.
Does anyone know of a list of needed/recommended dll’s and other odds
and sods needed? I thought of copying the dll’s from the ‘one click
installer’ but maybe they are not fully compatible with latest ruby
preview. In particular, I have hunted for pdcurses 2.8 dll but can’t
find it.
I’m happy to try my hand at compiling from source if anyone can point
me in the right direction for a newbie. I’ve looked at mingw but it
seems I need to download a whole bunch of packages.

many thanks for any tips

#2

On 7/21/06, simonh [email protected] wrote:

many thanks for any tips
That depends on what compiler you are using to build Ruby. If you are
using
VC++6 then you are in luck, and most extensions are readily available in
binary form. If you are using any other compiler then you will most
likely
have to build everything from source.

See this thread for details on the issues:

http://www.nabble.com/One-Click-Installer%3A-MinGW--or-VC2005--tf1961178.html

Curt

#3

thanks for reply Curt. I’m not wanting to compile ruby at the moment,
just the external dependencies such as readline, ssh, pdcurses etc. Have
you managed to compile any of these (latest versions)?

Also, would you be able to enlighten me as to how .so files work? in the
lib/i386-mswin32 directory on windows there are a whole bunch of them:

curses.so, readline.so, socket.so …etc

Do these files link with dll’s on windows or can they operate on their
own? I asked this question a while back but never really got an
authoritive answer. I was under the impression that .so on *nix was
equivalent to .dll on windows. If this is the case then why would they
be installed on windows?

#4

I would tell that these .so files on windows are just renamed ordinary
.dlls. I don’t have windows right now here, so see for yourself (the
file should start with MZ and there should be some [almost
human-readable] info at the end)

#5

Jan S. wrote:

I would tell that these .so files on windows are just renamed ordinary
.dlls. I don’t have windows right now here, so see for yourself (the
file should start with MZ and there should be some [almost
human-readable] info at the end)

Yes Jan, the files do start MZ and some of the content is human
readable. win32ole and win32api are in there. So the question is: are
.so and .dll interchangeable? Another question is what are the dll’s in
ruby/bin directory for?

#6

On 7/21/06, Simon H. [email protected] wrote:

.so and .dll interchangeable? Another question is what are the dll’s in
ruby/bin directory for?

*.so files are, in fact, DLLs. “so” is the extension that Ruby looks for
when loading Ruby code that has been written in C. These DLLs live in
the
“lib” subdirectory tree. The DLLs that you see in the ruby\bin directory
are
usually external, non-Ruby, libraries that are called by the Ruby
bindings
for that lib, which are usually one or more *.so files.

Most of the libs used by the one-click installer are picked up in binary
form (there’s only a couple that I build from source).

Curt