This package is the most simple way to equip your Macintosh Apple OSX System with Ruby - similar to the Windows Ruby One-Click Installer. It replaces the broken Readline library, updates to a current version of SQLite3 and prepares your OSX for Rails, which needs at least Ruby 1.8.4 to run. The current Ruby Version is 1.8.6 (1.8.5 is recommended for Rails) and Rubygems 0.9.4.
This package’s intention is to remain small while being a Universal Binary that serves everything to deploy Ruby Applications on OSX Machines - Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger or Leopard. You don’t need to compile anything and you don’t need Apple’s Developer Tools (xcode) installed.
Some people use fink or other ports software, others (myself included) take the time to read through the HiveLogic post and do everything from scratch.
Now there’s another option, and if it lives up to its claims, it should be A Good Thing.
This is promising. I hope that they're planning to open source the actual build process for the installer so that other folks can contribute (similar to how the One-Click Installer for Windows is managed).
Actually, isn't Locomotive a 'all in one directory' approach?
That's quite different.
No "other ports software". Use MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/) instead of Fink! Fink is very outdated while MacPorts is up-to-date and includes the latest Ruby, Fails and a lot of other Unix tools. At least as good as "from scratch" and easy to use, if you know how to use a package manager in a shell!
Werner -
It's my opinion that Mac OS X should include a built in package manager. Until it does, I'm not about to trust any third party package manager :)
@Gregory
I wish too that Apple would come out with a package manager. It is a good start that you can fit almost everything in the .app package but the "almost" is exactly that. I would want something that I could use to unistall (or regress) the whole application.
@Robert
Yeah, until they make that possible (and maybe even after),I may still build from scratch as I'm a bit of a control freak. But this is great news for deploying software on the Mac, so long as it's reasonably safe to use. I can fairly easily get a client to run through the install on this. :)
Thanks for the tip. I have spent enormous time trying to fix the readline problem so I can get the rails console to work, to no avail. So I switched to locomotive. But I will give this a try to get back to plain vanella Ruby.
Someone already followed all the instructions in the HiveLogic post? Any issues I should be aware of?
@Michael,
No issues that I know of. It's always worked great for me and I see it recommended all the time for 'How to install Ruby on OS X'
Thanks for the tips.
Sorry but i don't use MC with Ruby and can't compare diference with XP installer.
Good article and bookmarked to my online favorites manager.
Best regards
Sam