Just wanted to report my installation issues with Buildr on my Windows 7 64bit machine and how I worked around them.
I am new to Buildr and Ruby, so I'm not sure if the problems are specific to my computer and/or OS or not. I tried to follow the install instructions from the Buildr website (http://buildr.apache.org/installing.html#windows) and downloaded RubyInstaller for Windows 1.8.7 (and rolled back to 1.8.6 when I ran into troubles). To me it seems that Buildr 1.4.1 requires version 1.2.5 of rjb (Ruby-Java-Bridge), but the standard gems repository does not have a pre-compiled package for 1.2.5, only for the latest version 1.2.8. See http://rubygems.org/gems/rjb/versions. This is why installing Buildr with the platform --platform=mswin32 switch will trigger a compile of rjb which subsequently fails without a C compiler being present on the system. The RubyInstaller for Windows cannot compile Ruby gems by default, and fails with a rather obscure message pointing in the wrong direction, more precisely the check for jni.h in the JAVA_HOME / include directory fails and a Ruby noob like me would assume a problem with the Java install or some permission problem. Google did not really help (quickly). What did the trick for me was to install the 'DevKit' from the RubyInstaller for W. website. Version 4.5.0 failed with a different error message ('long long long is too long'), but with 3.4.5 I was finally able to compile rjb 1.2.5 and install Buildr 1.4.1. Other steps I took that might or might not have affected the outcome of the install - use 32bit JDK instead of 64bit - set JAVA_HOME to 8.3 character file name, e.g. c:\progra~2\java\jdk1.6.0_21 - install Ruby into a directory path that does not contain spaces Hope my email will help other Buildr/Ruby noobs and/or maybe help solve the dependency problem (if there actually is one ;)) Samuel Ecko
