[wxruby-users] wxRuby 1.9.6

[Alex Fenton]

I'm happy to announce that the latest version of wxRuby is available now 
from Rubyforge. This release contains many bugfixes, enhancements and a 
few additional features, and it's a recommended upgrade.

== INSTALLATION ==

The release can be downloaded from:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35&release_id=21668

Or installed via rubygems for Windows, Linux and OS X:
(sudo) gem install wxruby

Note that the upcoming ruby version 1.8.7 is NOT supported (see below)

== WHAT'S NEW ==

This release contained a record number of changes among recent releases; 
these are detailed in full in the ChangeLog, but highlights include:

* New MingW build for Windows (somewhat experimental - see below)
* Added AboutDialogInfo and AnimationCtrl GUI classes
* Added ToolBar and Animation helper classes
* Substantial improvements to Image class such as raw data manipulation 
and reading to IO
* Minor syntax enhancements and additional methods in existing classes
* Many fixes to long-standing and newly identified bugs, crashers, and 
memory leaks
* Additions to the samples and documentation

== PLATFORMS AND RUBY VERSIONS ==
A quick note on where wxRuby is going with regards to ruby versions.

Firstly, the One-Click Installer on Windows is likely to move over to 
compiling with MingW (gcc on Windows) instead of the Microsoft 
toolchain. This is very good news for wxRuby - we're currently relying 
on old, unsupported and unavailable versions of MSVC. wxRuby under MingW 
is also significantly faster, and will make it easier for contributors 
on Windows to work on the core library. However at present a few classes 
are not available - eg GLCanvas

For more information, see:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/4056d40003e05728/5d4ebedd430dec4a

Note that the -mingw build will NOT work with the current OCI - you must 
use the gem tagged -mswin32

With regard to ruby versions, 1.8.6 is currently the preferred version, 
although recent 1.8.x releases should work. The emerging 1.9.x releases 
will be fully supported, although there is a bug in ruby 1.9.0 which 
currently breaks important functionality in wxRuby.

The upcoming ruby 1.8.7 version introduces numerous internal and API 
changes that are not backwards compatible, and cause a real headache for 
library maintainers. There are no plans to support this version at present.

== BUGS ETC ==
The bugfixes for this release mean that the bug list on Rubyforge is 
down to a small list most of which can only be fixed by changes to 
wxWidgets. So please do report any crashes or wrong behaviour with this 
release to get the final stable release as good as possible.

== THANKS ==
Thank you very much to everyone who contributed patches, bug reports and 
code samples to this release. Particular thanks to Mario, who has been 
the driving force in getting the MingW build flying.

cheers
alex