One-Click Ruby Installer project stopped?

Ruby
1

Hi,

I am wondering if work on the One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows has
been
stopped?

This is taken from the announcement of the OCI 186-27 RC1 two months
ago:

—oOo—

NOTE: Keep in mind this is a Release Candidate and should be used for
compatibility testing until Final version is released.

If no outstanding issue is raised, I’ll consider this version stable and
mark
it as final. If not, expect another RC next week :smiley:

Thank you again for your patience waiting for this release.

—oOo—

There has been no more RCs but still no Final Release.

I have tried asking the same question through the OCI project web site
on
RubyForge but have received no reply.

Best regards,

Claus Folke B.
JN Data, Denmark

2

On Nov 14, 5:30 am, Claus Folke B. [email protected] wrote:

There has been no more RCs but still no Final Release.

I have tried asking the same question through the OCI project web site
on
RubyForge but have received no reply.

Best regards,

Claus Folke B.
JN Data, Denmark

Hey Claus,

Where did you ask about it?

I got no notification from RubyForge about it, sorry.

Right now we have 2 blockers for releasing the final -27 of One-Click:

  • Rake fully compatible with Windows
  • Solve some installer issues.

The installer issues are reported in RubyForge as bugs, and should be
easy to get fixed.

On the other hand, we are working with Rake developers to fix several
issues introduced in latest releases that affected many Windows users.

The goal of this release is include latest RubyGems (1.3.1) and also
latest version of Rake to workaround all these issues.

Please apologize you thought we stopped working on it.

Regards,

3

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Luis L. wrote:

Right now we have 2 blockers for releasing the final -27 of One-Click:

  • Rake fully compatible with Windows
  • Solve some installer issues.

The installer issues are reported in RubyForge as bugs, and should be
easy to get fixed.

On the other hand, we are working with Rake developers to fix several
issues introduced in latest releases that affected many Windows users.

It might be worth adding a news item about this sort of thing to the
site. This would help people see that the project is still alive.
Also, may I suggest that you provide people with some
information about how you’d like them to test the candidate release?
Obviously the wider usage you get of a candidate the better, but a
“sketch” of which parts you really would like people to stress would
help: it could give an impression of which bits you consider
particularly stable as well, for those reluctant to install a
release candidate.

Are there plans for a 1.8.7 release, or are you just waiting for 1.9.1
to come out, and skip 1.8.7?

Is there any prospect of a 64-bit release (for those flavours of Vista
that support it)?

If I got some time to help I’d need to know about the tools used to
create this, but
http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?DevDoc
says it will be updated soon, and it last was in April. Proof that
the team is busy, certainly :slight_smile: Updating that would make it easier
for people to help you, I think.

    Thank you,
    Hugh
4

On Nov 14, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Luis L. wrote:

Plans for 1.9 are contemplated but not for the current One-Click
codebase. Bundling everything makes difficult differentiate ruby from
the packages that need to be tested for compatibility.

What should I recommend to PickAxe readers? I’m planning to ship the
book when 1.9.1 is stable, and I’d like to give them good advice.

Dave

5

On Nov 14, 2:24 pm, Hugh S. [email protected] wrote:

issues introduced in latest releases that affected many Windows users.

Guilty of charge.

Basically the update boosted 1.8.6 to patchlevel 287, which included
all the “security patches” that make nervous everybody a few months
ago.

It also included updated version of RubyGems, but at that time was
1.2.0, after that 1.3.0 was released and was broken on Windows, which
I missed the release deadline and generated some issues for the few
users upgraded.

The last piece of the puzzle was Rake, which added some things that
broke most of the shell calls. I’m working with the Rake developers
and contributors to see these things and came up with something that
works for One-Click, Jruby and others.

Are there plans for a 1.8.7 release, or are you just waiting for 1.9.1
to come out, and skip 1.8.7?

No plans for 1.8.7, even with 1.8.6-p287 had weird results for things
like ParseTree, which is important for several projects that depend
on.

Plans for 1.9 are contemplated but not for the current One-Click
codebase. Bundling everything makes difficult differentiate ruby from
the packages that need to be tested for compatibility.

You can check here the list of packages included in RC1:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/shownotes.php?group_id=167&release_id=26150

Not to mention the ones not updated :smiley:

Is there any prospect of a 64-bit release (for those flavours of Vista
that support it)?

Current One-Click is build based on binary releases available at
garbagecollect page:

http://www.garbagecollect.jp/ruby/mswin32/

There are no plans for 64bits for current installer, since it depends
on this VC6 builds.

The 64bits available builds are for 1.9, but those depends on VC8,
something we are trying to avoid and move to MinGW (GCC) to reduce the
discrepancies across platforms for the build process (not only of ruby
but extensions and other projects).

mingw-w64 will provide the building blocks, it can cross-compile from
32bits OS targeting 64bits

My installed OS base is 32bits XP, with only one x64 XP edition
available, and cannot book that resource for OpenSource projects at
this time.

If I got some time to help I’d need to know about the tools used to
create this, buthttp://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?DevDoc
says it will be updated soon, and it last was in April. Proof that
the team is busy, certainly :slight_smile: Updating that would make it easier
for people to help you, I think.

To work on current installer, these docs are up to date. To work on
the new installer, the docs are in the readme document at github:

http://www.github.com/luislavena/rubyinstaller

Bootstrapping only requires Ruby+Rake :slight_smile:

With the new installer we found issues that make difficult build
different versions of the same package (on which Ruby depends like
readline, zlib, and others).

Work on this new building process has made some progress the past
days:

Some progress about One-Click Installer can be found in my blog:

http://blog.mmediasys.com/

Also the developer mailing list is a good resource:

http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubyinstaller-devel

    Thank you,
    Hugh

Thanks to you Hugh for your interest and please apologize the lack of
organization :frowning:

We definitely need some help :slight_smile:

Regards,

6

On Sat, 15 Nov 2008, Luis L. wrote:

releases".

Doing a release for 1.9 series requires review of all those packages,
some not being updated for 1.9 and others that lacks complete set of
testing setup that can ease the process of review.

Can I suggest you make more “noise” about this, please? It needs to
get out on the Rubyforge site, on the Wiki, and elsewhere. This is
a serious problem affecting open source and community based software,
and those who object to this model of development have a strong case
when they speak of “abandonware”.
The positive things that will help, I think, are:

List the affected projects.
People may have forgotten their stuff got bundled, and if it
got bundled because of something else, they may not know.

For each, list what needs to be done
Update for new language features, compatibility with new library
versions, build of test harness, probably other stuff, (docs?).
Maybe you need people to test stuff on Windows Vista Home, Windows
Vista Business, and Windows Vista Ultimate, on 32 bits and 64, on
Athlons and on Intels, on versions of windows as old as 95, on
netbooks and servers, on Wine on Linux.

If you can tell us what tools we need, what versions, that’s even
better.
Is it practical to make a One Click developer’s kit for the One Click
installer? A One Click tester’s kit? This is about lowering the
barrier to getting help.
Maybe the Rubicon project can be resurrected, it’s descendants
contacted, (Tattle?) so that the stats and bugs can be collected?

This is probably a smaller task than solving the problem itself
directly. We need this big task sliced up into small enough bits
so that people feel they can contribute. Everyone is busy.
People will find different bits trivial to handle, something that
looks like a month long project for one person may be doable in an
afternoon by someone working in that area.
Maybe as you get started documenting what needs to be done, people
will get the idea and contribute to this preliminary stage.
Perhaps adopting this model for a status page would be useful:

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/status.html

I wonder if you can turn some of these things into small enough projects
to be deemed fit for the Ruby Q.?

We really need some sort of call-to-arms on this. I wonder if Dave and
Andy would let us adopt the slogan “Don’t live with broken Ruby on
Windows”?

    Hugh
7

On Nov 15, 1:36 am, Dave T. [email protected] wrote:

On Nov 14, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Luis L. wrote:

Plans for 1.9 are contemplated but not for the current One-Click
codebase. Bundling everything makes difficult differentiate ruby from
the packages that need to be tested for compatibility.

What should I recommend to PickAxe readers? I’m planning to ship the
book when 1.9.1 is stable, and I’d like to give them good advice.

As you may know One-Click bundles almost the world in Rubyland. Some
of the things bundled has not been updated (by the project developers)
since 2006 and are still bundled “for compatibility with previous
releases”.

Doing a release for 1.9 series requires review of all those packages,
some not being updated for 1.9 and others that lacks complete set of
testing setup that can ease the process of review.

The work on RubyInstaller (Ruby+RubyGems) based on MinGW is about to
cover both 1.8 and 1.9. Since it will not be shipped with any other
gem or extension, is under user control to be able to download these
for 1.9.

The binaries from garbagecollect for 1.9 can be easily used just
adding the missing dlls for some of the extensions (like openssl or
zlib). Yet still it depends on VC6 and some of the gems, extensions
and libraries from current Installer will not work.

I guess lot of people will complain about this, but is the healthy
option at this time (I’m open to suggestions, of course).

Regards,

8

On Nov 15, 2008, at 11:42 AM, Hugh S. wrote:

Can I suggest you make more “noise” about this, please? It needs to
get out on the Rubyforge site, on the Wiki, and elsewhere. This is
a serious problem affecting open source and community based software,
and those who object to this model of development have a strong case
when they speak of “abandonware”.

One simple suggestion. Change RubyGems in 1.9 so the default value for
required_ruby_version is ‘< 1.9’

Then, existing gems that don’t have an explicit value for this (which
is probably 99% of them) will not even try to load on 1.9. Their
maintainers can at some point test them with 1.9 and then add the
required_ruby_version line which will make them work again (with both
1.8 and 1.9).

This will also help rubyforge—it can display a 1.9 icon next to gems
that have the appropriate Ruby version set, allowing both users and
maintainers to see what’s what.

Dave

9

On Nov 16, 1:27 am, Dave T. [email protected] wrote:

Then, existing gems that don’t have an explicit value for this (which
is probably 99% of them) will not even try to load on 1.9. Their
maintainers can at some point test them with 1.9 and then add the
required_ruby_version line which will make them work again (with both
1.8 and 1.9).

This will also help rubyforge—it can display a 1.9 icon next to gems
that have the appropriate Ruby version set, allowing both users and
maintainers to see what’s what.

Would you please bring this subject to rubygems-devel mailing list?

http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers

I believe you have a point, but both Eric H. (maintainer) and Tom
Copeland (RubyForge) can provide more details about current situation
than I can do.

In any case, no more bundling will be present in new One-Click
Installer, but different packages will be generated (more details to
come).

Regards,