Which native extensions should we package?

[FooBarWidget]

In issue #3 I have described how I envision support for native extensions to work. Since requiring developers to build native extensions themselves is too much hassle, I proposed providing precompiled versions of the most popular native extensions, that developers can just easily drop into their package.

But this raises the question: which native extensions? We can't automatically package them all. For reasons explained in #3, packaging native extensions requires a lot of manual work. So we have to choose.

I plan on packaging these gems:

Because they're popular:

• nokogori
• json

Because Rails apps likely need these:

• sqlite3
• mysql2
• pg
• bcrypt

I've opened a poll for more native extensions. Please add your input here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oNgrwHyV9UaMGFTttsfA9QPvL461NWLfHeeAap3Az_A/edit?usp=sharing

[drnic]

Thanks!! :gift:

[drnic]

traveling-bosh is now fully operational - thanks @FooBarWidget https://blog.starkandwayne.com/2014/12/24/traveling-bosh-cli-no-more-installation-pain/

[etdsoft]

Hi team,

What about @jgarber's RedCloth - https://github.com/jgarber/redcloth?

Also, are there any docs that explain what is involved in the process?

Thanks

[FooBarWidget]

It involves adding the gem to shared/Gemfile and rebuilding the binaries using the relevant scripts. But if the gem requires any additional libraries, then you will have to update the runtime builder script to compile a statically linked version of the library without further dependencies. It's very much custom and manual work for each library.

[FooBarWidget]

RedCloth, escape_utils, posix-spawn, nokogumbo and github-markdown have been added because they're needed by Octodown.

[FooBarWidget]

rugged has been added.

[FooBarWidget]

charlock_holmes has been added.

[etdsoft]

Hey Hongli, do you plan to push a new release now that all the Octodown gems have been added? We're planing to use traveling-ruby for the next release of Dradis Framework too. This is where all the RedCloth stuff was coming from.

[FooBarWidget]

Soon. I work on Traveling Ruby occasionally during the weekend, but during the week most of my time is occupied by Passenger maintenance/development as well as business operations.

[etdsoft]

Of course, makes sense, no rush.

[FooBarWidget]

The unf_ext gem has been added. It's used by Elasticrawl.

[FooBarWidget]

Traveling Ruby 20150130 is out. Next version is planned to use Ruby 2.2, as per GH-28.

[etdsoft]

excellent!

[ghost]

what about Puma?

[FooBarWidget]

Added puma, unicorn, kgio, raindrops, fast-stemmer, hitimes, redcarpet.

[ghost]

awesome! thanks.

[ghost]

ok, i see puma, unicorn etc. in shared/gemfiles/20150210-next of next branch. would they be available on s3 any soon? thanks for your efforts.

[Nowaker]

I added nio4r to the list. This is a dependency of Celluloid::IO which is great for making concurrent HTTP requests.

[Nowaker]

@FooBarWidget The same as @sleewoo - when can you release binaries for puma? The spreadsheet says "Already packaged" but Puma is not available at http://traveling-ruby.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/list.html.

[FooBarWidget]

It's packaged in the development branch. I'm sick right now and there are lots of high-priority non-Travling-Ruby things on my todo list, so I'm afraid I can't give you a time indication right now.

[Nowaker]

Are there any binaries for the development branch?

[FooBarWidget]

No. I build it from my laptop on every release. If you need binaries now, you should run the build scripts yourself.

[ghost]

i was able to build everything in next branch. could provide output if interested. extensions are full of backdoors of course :)

[michaelbarton]

Could it be possible to provide a native extension of gherkin, the gem that is used for cucumber? We would like to share our test suite for bioinformatics tools powered by cucumber. I gave this a try today but I saw that gherkin is a native extension.

[FooBarWidget]

I'll look into it. I've scheduled some time for Traveling Ruby maintenance work this week. Right now I'm blocked by https://bitbucket.org/ged/ruby-pg/issue/219/please-release-a-new-gem.

[michaelbarton]

Thanks. I took a look at the code for building native extensions. I think I almost got it to work, I was able to get everything to appear to compile but I wasn't sure about where the final output was produced, or if it was produced. I think with a little more documentation I think I might have been able to do this myself.

[FooBarWidget]

@michaelbarton The build output is in the 'output' directory. The 'package' script packages the output into tarballs.

Are you talking about gherkin or gherkin3?

[michaelbarton]

I think gherkin. From what I understand gherkin3 is still in development.

[FooBarWidget]

Ok, version 20150517 is released now, with support for many extensions requested in the past 2 months.

[dapicester]

I added websocket-driver. It was extracted from Faye to provide WebSocket support for Ruby.

[ashes999]

Hi,

I added gosu. Like most remaining gems on the list, it only has one vote (mine). If you can get back to me about whether this is feasible or not (not actually building the binaries, but assessing it), that would be great @FooBarWidget

[Nowaker]

I've added concurrent-ruby to the list. It's become a very important library now that Sprockets and Sidekiq depend on it.