What do these RubyInstaller 2.4 components do?

Question

A few days ago, RubyInstaller 2.4 for Windows was released.

Upon installation, it asks me the following question.

_____       _           _____           _        _ _         ___
|  __ \     | |         |_   _|         | |      | | |       |__ \
| |__) |   _| |__  _   _  | |  _ __  ___| |_ __ _| | | ___ _ __ ) |
|  _  / | | | '_ \| | | | | | | '_ \/ __| __/ _` | | |/ _ \ '__/ /
| | \ \ |_| | |_) | |_| |_| |_| | | \__ \ || (_| | | |  __/ | / /_
|_|  \_\__,_|_.__/ \__, |_____|_| |_|___/\__\__,_|_|_|\___|_||____|
                    __/ |           _
                  |___/          _|_ _  __   | | o __  _| _     _
                                  | (_) |    |^| | | |(_|(_)\^/_>

  1 - MSYS2 base installation
  2 - MSYS2 repository update
  3 - MSYS2 and MINGW development toolchain
Which components shall be installed? [1,2,3]

What is the difference between these options? Which should I choose? Do any of these make the separate installation of the Ruby DevKit obsolete?

Articles found

I have searched and found some related articles, but was unable to figure out the answer to my question.

• https://rubyinstaller.org/2017/05/25/rubyinstaller-2.4.1-1-released.html
• https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2
• https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/wiki/FAQ
• https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Answer 1

The components are defined here. The single options do:

1. Download, verify and run the MSYS2-installer. This installs the base MSYS2 environment (bash, pacman, tar, etc.) without development packages.
2. Download the pacman repository inventory. This retrieves version information about all available MSYS2+MINGW packages.
3. Download and install the development packages, which are typically required to compile ruby C extensions.

You should usually just press enter and execute all three options. And if something fails, you can restart the MSYS2 installation anytime later per ridk install.

My aim is to add some more component install options in the future. For instance to install bundler or rails or some other popular gems or extensions subsequent to the base ruby installation.

You don't need to install the previous DevKit. MSYS2 replaces the DevKit starting with RubyInstaller-2.4.

Since MSYS2 has much more packages available then the old DevKit, it also makes installations of many source gems possible. While previously any dependent libraries needed to be shipped as source tar or as "fat binary gem" (like nokogiri), now dependent native libraries can easily installed per pacman, similar to apt-get on Debian/Ubuntu. This is a big advantage of MSYS2 compared to the DevKit. The other advantage is that the programs and libraries are more up-to-date and actively maintained.