Question

I can’t seem to get the Ruby Shoes packager to correctly create an exe with Shoes included. I’m using the Raisins release (0.r1134), with the pack.rb replaced from github. The exe’s the packager makes are all 70-80K files (they obviously don’t include shoes or ruby). These exe’s will run on my XP machine that already has Shoes on it. but when I copy them to another laptop they start a “Shoes is downloading” dialog that does nothing and then goes away.

I need to make standalone Windows exe’s, and my understanding was that the “Yes, I want Shoes included” option in the packager would do that. Did I misunderstand the intent? Is there a way to make this work? Hope so, because I love Shoes. As most women do. Hmm… maybe Shoes was _why’s attempt at getting more women into programming as well as kids…but I digress.

The other threads I’ve found here imply this will work:

Problem in Ruby Shoes packaging?

Shoes packager problem

Answer 1

Although the pack.rb file now references the new website, shoes.heroku.com, it seems as if the files have fallen off it. So it won’t be generating a proper .exe. Whoops.

You can work around this by placing the Shoes Raisins installer, if you have it, in the LIB_DIR and renaming it. E.g. this works for me:

D:\Users\me\.shoes\raisins\win32\latest_shoes-novideo.exe

pack.rb will check here before trying to download.

Note that you might still have issues with the executable working. Personally I’ve found distributing a .shy more reliable.

Some work needs to be done on packaging (I am involved with Shoes).