where to get required/recommended dll's on win32

[simonh]

Hi. I'm wanting to try out ruby 1.8.5 preview2 on microsoft windows.
Does anyone know of a list of needed/recommended dll's and other odds
and sods needed? I thought of copying the dll's from the 'one click
installer' but maybe they are not fully compatible with latest ruby
preview. In particular, I have hunted for pdcurses 2.8 dll but can't
find it.
I'm happy to try my hand at compiling from source if anyone can point
me in the right direction for a newbie. I've looked at mingw but it
seems I need to download a whole bunch of packages.

many thanks for any tips

 

[Simon Harrison]

thanks for reply Curt. I'm not wanting to compile ruby at the moment,
just the external dependencies such as readline, ssh, pdcurses etc. Have
you managed to compile any of these (latest versions)?

Also, would you be able to enlighten me as to how .so files work? in the
lib/i386-mswin32 directory on windows there are a whole bunch of them:

curses.so, readline.so, socket.so ...etc

Do these files link with dll's on windows or can they operate on their
own? I asked this question a while back but never really got an
authoritive answer. I was under the impression that .so on *nix was
equivalent to .dll on windows. If this is the case then why would they
be installed on windows?

 

[Jan Svitok]

I would tell that these .so files on windows are just renamed ordinary
dlls. I don't have windows right now here, so see for yourself (the
file should start with MZ and there should be some [almost
human-readable] info at the end)

 

[Simon Harrison]

I would tell that these .so files on windows are just renamed ordinary
.dlls. I don't have windows right now here, so see for yourself (the
file should start with MZ and there should be some [almost
human-readable] info at the end)

Yes Jan, the files do start MZ and some of the content is human
readable. win32ole and win32api are in there. So the question is: are
so and .dll interchangeable? Another question is what are the dll's in
ruby/bin directory for?