Building and Installing ruby-debug from rubyforge's Subversion Repository (svn)

The below are Unix-centric instructions. If you have Microsoft Windows see 
the section on building Microsoft Windows.


0. Prerequisites: To build the package you'll need at a minimum:

 - Ruby (of course). Currently only version 1.8.6 and above but not 
   version 1.9.x work.
 - Ruby development headers. This typically includes a file called "ruby.h"
 - A C compiler like GNU C (gcc)
 - Rake
 - Subversion (svn)

If you want to build the documentation and install Emacs files, you'll
also need:

 - a POSIX shell
 - autoconf
 - automake
 - GNU Make
 - texinfo

1. Basic package checkout and installation 

Check out the trunk of repository following the instructions at 
http://rubyforge.org/scm/?group_id=1900  For example on a Unixy system,
this may work:

  mkdir ruby-debug
  cd ruby-debug
  svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ruby-debug/trunk trunk

In order to make the Ruby gems, ruby-debug and ruby-debug-base, get
yourself into the trunk directory after the code has been checked out and run:

  cd trunk # This is the same trunk checked out above.
  rake package

If all goes well you should have some gem files put in the directory
pkg. Use the gem command to install that. 

  sudo gem install ruby-debug-*.gem   # See gem help for other possibilities

If all goes well the rdebug script has been installed ruby-debug is
now ready to run. But if everything goes well you might want to run
the built-in regression tests to make sure everything is okay.
See step 3 below.

If the gem install didn't work,'t there may be a problem with your C
compiler or the Ruby headers are not installed.

2. Trying out without installing. 

You don't have to build a gem file to try out ruby debug. In fact when
developing new features for ruby-debug, developers often you want to
try it out *before* installing.  If you have a problem in the latter
part of step 1 you may want to try this approach since we go into a
little more detail as to what happens under the covers when you do the
gem install.

Run (from trunk)
  rake lib

This creates a Makefile and builds the ruby-debug shared library. (On
Unix the name is ruby_debug.so).

Once this is done you can run the debugger as you would rdebug using the
script rdbg.rb. For example (again from trunk)

  ./rdbg.rb ~/my-ruby-program.rb

3. Running the Regression tests
  
We've put together some basic tests to make sure ruby-debug is doing
what we think it should do. To run these (from trunk):

  rake test

If you didn't build the ruby-debug shared library and skipped step 2,
don't worry "rake test" will do step 2 for you. You should see a line that
ends something like:

  Finished in 2.767579 seconds.

  12 tests, 35 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

The number of seconds, tests, and assertions may be different from the
above. However you *should* see exactly "0 failures, 0 errors".

4. Building the documentation and testing/installing Emacs files

Of course, I recommend you read the ruby-debug manual that comes with
the package. If you have the prerequisites described above, run this
once:
  sh ./autogen.sh

Then run:
  ./configure
  make
  make test           # Runs Emacs regression tests
  sudo make install   # Or arrange to do this as root
 

Microsoft Windows

A problem here seems to be that the "One-click" install is compiled
using Microsoft Visual Studio C 6 which is not sold anymore and is
rather old. 

Instead I suggest building via mingw/msys. 
http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?cmd=view&p=cross+compiling+rcovrt&key=mingw has instructions on how to do. Some amendments to these instructions. 

First, those instructions are a little GNU/Linux centric. If you are
using Ubuntu or Debian, then this should be the easiest to follow the
instructions. On Ubuntu or Debian there is a mingw3 Debian
package. Installing that will give you the cross compiler that is a
prerequisite. Alternatively if you are running MS Windows I notice
that cygwin also has a mingw package. Or possibly you could use MinGW
directly. For other OS's you might have to build a cross-compiler,
i.e. gcc which emits win32 code and can create a win32 DLL.

After you have a cross compiler you need to download the Ruby source
and basically build a ruby interpreter. The cross-compile.sh script
works although when I downloaded it, it had lots of blank space at the
beginning which will mess up the Unix magic interpretation. That is
remove the blanks in front of "#/bin/sh"

On my system, this script fails in running "make ruby" because the
fake.rb that got created needed to have a small change:

	    ALT_SEPARATOR = "\"; \
should be 
	    ALT_SEPARATOR = "\\"; \

After fixing this, run 
  make ruby
Also, I needed to run
  make rubyw

And then "make install" as indicated. 

Once all of that's in place, the place you want be is in
ruby-debug/trunk/ext/win32, not ruby-debug/ext. 

So let's say you've installed the cross-compiled install ruby in
/usr/local/ruby-mingw32/. Here then are the commands to build ruby-debug-base-xxx-mswin32.gem

   cd .../ruby-debug/trunk/ext/win32 
   ruby -I /usr/local/ruby-mingw32/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mingw32 ../extconf.rb
   make # Not rake
   cd ../..   # back in ruby-debug/trunk
   rake win32_gem