The bane of any ruby/rails developer on a windows box (apart from piddling performance) is seeing the dreaded …
‘gem install error – ‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command’
No more!
Devkit, a tool used by the folks who create the Windows Ruby Installer of each version of ruby helps you with (most) gems that need to be built natively.
Muchos Gracias to them for graciously providing it to us.
Installing gems is usually very quick on my computer … its the accompanying ri and rdoc installations that slows everything down to a crawl.
There’s an easy way to stop ri and rdoc installs on Windows.
All you have to do is go to
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ on Windows XP
or
C:\ProgramData\ on Windows 7
create a file called gemrc
then put in the following
gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc
Hat tip to this Stack Overflow comment, give the man some more upvotes!