Cygwin/Rails

A few notes taken while trying to get Rails working on Cygwin:

• Stock Ruby works perfectly (so far)
• Getting gem to work is also standard fare (get tar file, unpack, ruby setup.rb)
• Installing Rails using gem works first time, but is slow (generating documentation takes a long time)
• Tests work, but there's no decent database support.
• The sqlite-ruby gem does not like SQLite3 (which, incidentally, installs and works fine in Cygwin, provided you run configure --disable-tcl and use a separate build directory). I have, in fact, tried gem install sqlite3, but the results were less than optimal. Maybe next time.

The right incantation for building the gem seems to be:

gem install sqlite-ruby -- --with-sqlite-lib=/usr/local/lib /
--with-sqlite-include=/usr/local/include

...but it does not like the new "3" suffix on headers and libs.

• Unpacking sqlite-2.8.16 and installing it (also without Tcl support) worked:

$ gem install sqlite-ruby -- --with-sqlite-lib=/usr/local/lib /
> --with-sqlite-include=/usr/local/include
Attempting local installation of 'sqlite-ruby'
Local gem file not found: sqlite-ruby*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'sqlite-ruby'
Select which gem to install for your platform (i386-cygwin)
 1. sqlite-ruby 2.2.3 (mswin32)
 2. sqlite-ruby 2.2.3 (ruby)
 3. sqlite-ruby 2.2.2 (mswin32)
 4. sqlite-ruby 2.2.2 (ruby)
 5. sqlite-ruby 2.2.1 (ruby)
 6. sqlite-ruby 2.2.1 (mswin32)
 7. sqlite-ruby 2.2.0 (mswin32)
 8. sqlite-ruby 2.2.0 (ruby)
 9. sqlite-ruby 2.1.0 (ruby)
 10. sqlite-ruby 2.1.0 (mswin32)
 11. sqlite-ruby 2.0.3 (ruby)
 12. sqlite-ruby 2.0.2 (ruby)
 13. Cancel installation
> 2
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
...
Successfully installed sqlite-ruby-2.2.3
Installing RDoc documentation for sqlite-ruby-2.2.3...

If you have problems building the native extensions, try doing a rebaseall on a standard Cygwin prompt without any Cygwin-based daemons running.