[libxml-devel] Release and Windows Gem

[Charlie Savage]

> It occurs to me that extconf.rb is really nothing special. It is
> mkmf.rb, which extconf.rb uses, that is special. So then we should be
> able to simply put a master if-condition in there and do the mkmf.rb
> thing if on Linux, and generate our own Makefile instead if on
> Windows. Would that work ok?  The reason I suggest that is b/c from
> what I can tell, RubyGems and setup.rb rely on the extconf.rb way of
> doing things --and if we would like things to work smoothly on Windows
> --like they do on Linux, then it seems to be what we'd have to do.

Could do it that way.  The other way is don't bother at all - just 
provide a Windows gem with a pre-compiled binary.  Besides being 
simpler, its more realistic - almost no one on Windows has a C/C++ 
compiler installed so making extconf.rb/mkmf.rb work doesn't really buy 
you much.

Thus for ruby-prof I build a Windows executable on my machine, put it in 
  source control, and create a Windows specific gem for it.

I think that's the way to go - its easy and fool-proof.  The downside of 
course is that it means you have to have a special environment setup to 
rebuild the Windows binary, but that's going to be true no matter what 
you do.

Charlie
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