Question

Yea pretty much it. On windows xp sp3. This is what happens:

jruby -S gem install a_gem_with_c_extensions

failed to build a_gem_with_c_extensions

could not find make command

Do i need cygwin, mingw, ruby dev-kit ?

Why it’s not documented ? Native extension support feature has been out like 7 months now but no one has ever written one line to teach how to set it up?

Answer 1

finally i found what i was doing wrong:

of course the easy way on windows is with ruby devkit but i did something wrong while i was following installation instruction:

1. Download the current DevKit-tdm-…-sfx.exe file from here.
2. Run the self-extracting executable and select to extract it in C:\RubyDevKit.
3. After the extract is done, open up a Ruby command prompt and navigate to C:\RubyDevKit.
4. Run the following commands:

ruby dk.rb init

ruby dk.rb install

I did it exactly as above at the time, but then I erroneously thought that C:\RubyDevKit was not needed anymore and deleted the whole folder, thus resulting in gem devkit scripts not being able to find the “make” command, located in C:\RubyDevKit\bin

fixed it like this: execute again all the steps above, but use –force option on last command: ruby dk.rb install –force

oh, and don’t delete C:\RubyDevKit* afterward 🙂

Hope this can help someone 🙂