Change away from `rb-appscript`

[BrendanThompson]

Hey there,

Is there any chance of moving away from rb-appscript as there are issues getting it installed onto Yosemite.

[devondragon]

What issues are you running into? I am running on Yosemite here (10.10.4) and it is working here. I don't know the Ruby universe much, Is there something that is recommended to use instead of rb-appscript for integration with applescript?

[BrendanThompson]

@devondragon i keep getting the following when i try to install rb-appscript, have you seen it before:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing rb-appscript:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20150713-72502-3b0x77.rb extconf.rb
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary
libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more details.  You may
need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
    --with-opt-dir
    --with-opt-include
    --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
    --with-opt-lib
    --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
    --with-make-prog
    --without-make-prog
    --srcdir=.
    --curdir
    --ruby=/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.2.2/bin/$(RUBY_BASE_NAME)
extconf.rb:44:in `<main>': uninitialized constant Config (NameError)

extconf failed, exit code 1

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/rb-appscript-0.6.1 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/extensions/x86_64-darwin-14/2.2.0/rb-appscript-0.6.1/gem_make.out

[2case]

Same problem here. If used homebrew to install ruby since the system has problems on gem management

[devondragon]

@2case : are you saying the issue is caused by the default ruby install but is fixed if you use homebrew? Or the other way around?

Either way it doesn't sound like something I can fix in the code or packaging here, right? Sorry Ruby-newbie.

[2case]

i use homebrew to manage my ruby installation, which is also the system i have the gem installation problem with. i didn't (and even won't) test it with the system ruby installation since the system ruby have general gem management problems because of the system/user rights.

As you can read in the http://appscript.sourceforge.net/status.html status message, the library is no longer developed or supported. There are missing libraries on 10.10 for some cocoa things so the rb-appscript build fail. Seems that on your system are old libs installed.

i tried to find the mkmf.log to check what exactly is the build problem, but this will seems deleted during the failure make handling...

[devondragon]

Hmm that is odd. I did a clean install of Yosemite on a new laptop so I shouldn't have any old libs on this computer at all.
There doesn't seem to be any easy path away from rb-appscript.. it looks like it would involve a lot of re-coding. If anything perhaps I could write the whole thing in applescript and ditch ruby.... hmmm.

[andrewguy9]

In Yosemite onwards they expose Javascript bindings for the old apple script interfaces. I haven't tried it yet, but maybe thats a good alternative to AppleScript.

[BrendanThompson]

Okay peeps, i spent a little time this morning modifying rb-apscript, i have created a forked gem called rb-scpt which can be found here, this now allows for it to be built cleaning on newer versions of Ruby.

It looks as though the issue was that in around Ruby 1.8 they changed from config to rbconfig, also it moved from the implicit requirement of config to the explicit requirement of rbconfig in the require statements.

Currently the gem isn't published and is just sitting in my GH. If you think it fits the brief let me know and i will publish it.

---

As per what @andrewguy9 is saying, you could indeed go for a more jxa orientated way :).

[BrendanThompson]

Okay, I have published the gem :). Although am having some issues with the script, it seems to be erroring on the config array, if it's empty.

[devondragon]

This has been fixed with PR 20 https://github.com/devondragon/jira-omnifocus/pull/20 from @grahl !