Ruby Programming Language on Haiku

Software
1

Can someone tell me the status of Ruby on Haiku in 2018?

I know that over the years different people were using ruby
on Haiku (I know that from ruby’s bugtracker since a few
of these people also filed bugs on the official bugtracker).

I am using Linux since ~2003 or so and I handle most of my
system via Ruby. I like Linux but I am not in “love” with it
necessarily. (I compile everything from source by making use
of ruby scripts). I do however had “love” ruby in the sense
that I think it is awesome - so I really need ruby on Haiku.

I can adjust all my scripts to another OS without that much
problem (just needs some time investment which I can do),
but I need to know whether ruby can work on Haiku
and if not, why not. Ideally I’d like to be able to compile an
up-to-date ruby on Haiku and use it.

I recently read that Haiku has a new release candidate, the
first “real” beta, and perhaps in a few months there may
be the first official Haiku release that can be used on
“real” hardware rather than only in a VM prison. But I
want to know whether ruby works there too - that way I
can invest time into adjusting my scripts. But if ruby does
not work then I can not use Haiku either (I am that stubborn),
which is why I have started this new thread as well.

Anyone of you who can put information about this here, it
would be well appreciated!

2

Being stubborn never helps, open your mind a bit more.

Ruby on Haiku seems to be tied to version 2.2.8-1 (released in 2017-09-14, more or less).

https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/?bcguid=bc1-XWAH&repos=haikuports&arch=x86_gcc2&viewcrttyp=FEATURED&srchexpr=ruby

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/releases/

And you can install it from the Haiku depot or using a terminal and operating with pkgman.

Not like i see the whole os taking a good advantage from rubying, as there was already a bundled python 2.7 core that is not managing the whole OS, but doing some tasks only.

3

Yes, it’s available in the depot. Not much of a ruby user myself but iirc there are some issues with installing gems system-wide.
Let us know if you run into problems and we’ll see what we can do.

4

One have to install gems like:
gem install --user-install jekyll
And have to add the /boot/home/.gem/ruby/2.2.0/bin folder to the PATH.

5

Yup… I raised the default behavior should be to install to user vs system to rubygem a while back:

6

I assume add-on installations of gems can be elsewhere such as the home directory of a user via the --user-install option. Rubygems itself has seen a lot of changes in the last ~2 years or so - I expect this part to become better.
There have been haiku users using ruby before; I know because there were others commenting on the ruby bug tracker, not just kallisti5. :slight_smile: But they encountered problems along the way, and I have to admit that my tinker days are largely over (I used to tinker a LOT on linux when I was younger). These days I sort of need a “stable” base system, and I wrote a lot of ruby code in almost 20 years. I sort of use ruby like shell scripts, just that … it’s in ruby. I wrote a “package” manager (not really, but I compile everything from source and track almost 4000 different programs so far). Modifying these scripts is trivial for me. I’d love to test them on haiku too, and adjust there, but for that I’d need a working base system, and I lack knowledge about haiku to really help with the “bootstrap” process.

I suppose I could use python perhaps but I am more comfortable with ruby.

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