Hello, world! Some notes about the current state of Ruby on GNU/Hurd:
- It runs with Moritz' patch. The patch and Debian packages are available at <http://duesseldorf.ccc.de/~moritz/ruby-hurd/>. - Neither the upstream version nor the package in Debian-unstable compile on GNU/Hurd. I am trying to find out why the patch was not included. More about that later. - Interactive Ruby (irb) does not work. It tries to read the users home directory as configuration file, but that does not contain valid Ruby code, of course. This is probably a bug in irb and at least finding a workaround shouldn't be to hard. The error message is the following: /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:160:in `load': /home/toor:1: Invalid char `\231' in expression (SyntaxError) /home/toor:1: Invalid char `\001' in expression /home/toor:1: parse error - ^ from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:160:in `run_config' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:158:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:158:in `run_config' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:157:in `catch' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:157:in `run_config' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb/init.rb:17:in `initialize' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/irb.rb:39:in `start' from /usr/bin/irb:13 - I had to insert a "void _start (void) {}" in a Ruby module I wrote (Alfred M. Szmidt found this solution for me). Otherwise I'd get the error message: ./hello.rb:3:in `require': /lib/libshouldbeinlibc.so.0.2: undefined symbol: _start - ./test.so (LoadError) from ./hello.rb:3 Various people in IRC (#hurd) proposed different locations for fixing this, including libc and libgcc. - The errno constants are wrong. For example, Errno::EBUSY::Errno does not give us EBUSY (0x40000010), but 0xC0000010. This has probably to do with the fact that Ruby converts the error codes to Fixnums and the Ruby Fixnum type is a 31-Bit integer. The Fixnum type is optimized for performance through some dirty hack: A Ruby object is of type VALUE in C, which is normaly a pointer. A Fixnum is stored directly in this VALUE, however. (Ruby requires sizeof(void*) to be sizeof(long). Yes, Ruby _is_ supposed to be portable). It uses the least significant bit (bit 0) of a VALUE to indicate that it is a Fixnum and stores the number in the bits 1-31, that's the reason why Fixnum is a 31-Bit integer. Ruby converts Fixnum VALUEs to integers and vice versa by shifting (and setting the lsb in case of int->Fixnum). However, this means that a Fixnum can't hold a value like 0xC0000010, which doesn't prevent Ruby from letting Errno::EBUSY::Errno.class be Fixnum and at the same time Errno::EBUSY::Errno be 0xC0000010. Oh, just in case you haven't noticed yet: 0x40000010 with the most significant bit set is this 0xC0000010 thing. Could this be some signed/unsigned problem? At least ruby -e 'puts Errno::EBUSY::Errno' prints the number -1073741808. Perhaps replacing INT2FIX() with INT2NUM() where Ruby converts the errno constants to VALUEs would solve this problem, I did not test this yet. Cheers, GNU/Wolfgang -- Wolfgang J�hrling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> `-:._ "Omnis enim res, quae dando Debian GNU/Linux user && Debian GNU/Hurd user `-:. non deficit, dum habetur Hurd Hacking Guide - http://stdio.cjb.net/hhg.html ) et non datur, nondum www.debian.org || www.gnu.org || hurd.gnu.org _,-:' habetur, quomodo habenda ["Accelerate your PC - with 9.81 m/s^2."] ,-:' est." --> fsfeurope.org <--
