Monday, January 16, 2012

Workaround for Ruby support on Netbeans 7.1

Firstly, I messed up. I should have had community-ruby ready for NetBeans 7.1 general release. For all the problems I created for you all, I apologize.



Secondly, The main issues with getting a good release of community-ruby in the catalog for NB 7.1 are:



  1. https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=207075 -- Some infrastructure broke which makes it impossible to release at the moment. This may seem like the big problem but in fact….
  2. Netbeans 7.1 updated some components (as software is known to do). One of those components was html.editor.lib. Ruby support was dependent on version 1, but NetBeans 7.1 only ships version 2 now. This is the main reason why the Ruby support from 7.0 is un-installable on 7.1.
I have addressed item 2 enough already to make it installable on NetBeans 7.1. In fact, so far I have:

  1. Updated internal JRuby shipped to 1.6.5.1 (from 1.1.4). It also means update JRuby internals for pieces of community-ruby which depends on JRuby internally. This is a good thing for the future of community-ruby. On top of that, it also gave me a really good idea of what we need to change in JRuby itself to help make JRuby more modular.
  2. Updated community-ruby to compile on Java 7
  3. Changed some no longer compilable unit test base classes to again compile. yay. Unfortunately, there are some regressions to be fixed. But we now have ci builds generating reasonable results again.
If you are interested in installing what I am calling preview1, then grab the preview zipfile. Once you have this file, unzip it (note location) and then within Netbeans 7.1 you can:

  1. Select Tools->Plugins from menu
  2. Select Downloaded tab
  3. Press Add Plugins...
  4. Navigate to where you unzipped the nbms files
  5. Select all files which end in .nbms (you can do this all in one selection but if you include any non-nbms file it greys out the open button)
  6. Accept and install…
Hopefully by the time 207075 is fixed, I will have things greener on the ci builds and also have the dreaded Rails hanging bug fixed. For tracking the official release of community-ruby you can watch bug 207025