[wxruby-users] wxRuby 1.9.9 released

[Alex Fenton]

Hello

I'm happy to announce that wxRuby version 1.9.9 is now available for 
download and gem installation:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35&release_id=27842
gem install wxruby

On Linux, the default binary gem is now dynamically linked to wxWidgets. 
This means you'll need to install wxWidgets from your package manager. 
See below for more info.

== CHANGES ==

This recommended upgrade includes a substantial number of new GUI 
features, as well as fixing a number of bugs:

* Added the RichText framework, providing word-processor like editing of 
styled/formatted text and inline images
* Added a number of other useful GUI classes, such as VScrolledWindow, 
VListBox and HtmlListBox
* Added the StandardPaths and NavigationKeyEvent classes
* Fixed a number of bugs and warnings
* Binary builds for Windows and OS X are based on the latest stable 
wxWidgets, 2.8.9, so benefitting from upstream fixes

It had been planned that 1.9.8 was the last release before 2.0. 1.9.9 is 
a chance to give some new classes some testing time and get some fixes 
out there whilst finishing up the last few 2.0 blocker bugs (eg 
Clipboard probs on GTK, ScrolledWindow X errors).

== LINUX BINARY GEMS ==

Previous binary builds for Linux were, like those for Windows and OS X, 
statically linked - meaning the wxRuby library included all the relevant 
wxWidgets code. With this release I've switched to offering a Linux gem 
that is dynamically linked - meaning it makes use of the wxWidgets 
library on your system - which should be easily installable from your 
package manager - eg apt-get install wxwidgets

The reasoning here:
* Because Linux systems vary a lot in what's installed by default, using 
the static build generally still required messing around installing new 
packages
* Package managers make it trivially easy to install a recent version of 
wxWidgets on major distros
* The shared builds are substantially smaller and may perform better

I'm open to discussion on this based on experiences on different distros 
(I've only tested on Ubuntu).

== ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ==

Thanks to all those who contributed bug reports and feature requests to 
this release, as well as those who keep the project ticking over in 
other ways such as keeping the wiki up to date and taking part on the 
mailing list.

cheers
alex