Syndi on Windows

Yay

Syndi 4.0 Phoenix brings back something which hasn’t existed since version 1.0: support for Microsoft Windows!

This is because we have prioritized programming v4.0 with platform independence from its inception.

How It Works

Windows users can install Syndi easily by downloading and installing from RubyGems:

$ gem install Syndi [--pre]

On Windows, this will install the native Windows distribution, which includes the csyndi library cross-compiled with Minimalist GNU for Windows, commonly called MinGW.

This assumes that you have installed Ruby compiled with MinGW; this is the case if you used RubyInstaller for Windows.

Compiling

Users who have good cause for doing so are also welcome to compile the source for Syndi themselves.

We should hope that DevKit will provide a sufficiently sane build environment for this on Windows. We haven’t tested it since we cross-compile on UNIX systems when packaging gems.

You must then force RubyGems to download the distribution without binaries, so that csyndi will be compiled:

$ gem install Syndi [--pre] --platform=ruby --development

Cross-compiling

You must have a cross-compiling toolset installed on your system. Install the MinGW toolset.

On Arch Linux, this can be installed with:

# pacman -Syu mingw32-gcc mingw32-pthreads

Then configure rake-compiler:

$ rake-compiler cross-ruby VERSION=1.9.3-p362

Now compile the source code for Windows:

$ rake cross compile

Package the native distribution gem:

$ rake cross native gem

Et voila! You should find the native gem in pkg/.