Re: MicroSoft Windows, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails (RoR) I formerly did a lot of offline development in Rails on a Windows XPpro system. I started out using pre-packaged native MS-Win binaries but eventually ran into a situation where the available Windows package simply did not work following a MicroSoft service pack 'upgrade' and the package authors could not agree on what was wrong or how to fix it.
At that juncture I switched to Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) and stopped fighting against the RoR OSX/Linux based paradigm. If you are planning on a lot of RoR development on an MS-Win platform and you wish to work with the current versions of the RoR framework and its many supporting tools then installing Cygwin and working within its shell on MS-Win will make your life as a developer considerably less frustrating. Once you have your software working inside Cygwin then you can concern yourself with obtaining the minimal number of native MS-Win ports required to just run the product when distributed. That is a lot easier to accomplish than building and maintaining a complete development environment with native MS-Win binaries. By the way, switching platforms to BSD/Linux/OSX often means trading one form of frustration for another. The unspoken assumption made by the adviser when such advice is given is that the recipient will undertake to discover any deficiencies in their particular distribution of BSD/Linux/OSX, acquire the missing bits, and then build those bits themselves. That process can present a very steep learning curve to somebody that just wants their development software to work. Just finding the appropriate package repositories (yum, apt, mac-ports, etc.) for your specific distribution can sometimes pose a major hurdle. Cygwin presents somewhat the same difficulty of course but, as it is both the repository (via setup.exe) and the environment (via the shell), it is the only additional thing that you need learn on your Windows host. Just a few thoughts for your consideration. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
