upgrading to 4.21.1 is requiring MSYS on Windows again

[junkimu]

We currently have Ruby 3.3.4 with ascli 4.20. Upgrading to 4.21 fails because MSYS2 could not be found. We are not using the transfer SDK (and thus gRPC which I understand brings in the MSYS dependency)

H:\>gem update aspera-cli
Updating installed gems
Updating aspera-cli
Fetching openssl-3.3.0.gem
Fetching net-ssh-7.3.0.gem
Fetching aspera-cli-4.21.1.gem
MSYS2 could not be found. Please run 'ridk install'
or download and install MSYS2 manually from https://msys2.github.io/

[laurent-martin]

Well, I think it is the upgrade to openssl 3.x gem that now require native extension

Is that a problem to install msys2 ?

[junkimu]

We deploy ascli to hundreds of non-technical users at our organization. Requiring each one to follow the installation and upgrade steps is not an option, so we do the installation/upgrade once, and deploy the entire ruby directory.

Without MSYS the ruby+ascli installation is about 60MB. MSYS adds about 1GB. Previously we worked around this by excluding the msys64 directory from the distribution and that has worked before, but we are not Ruby experts and we don't know what guarantees Ruby makes about this setup.

Speaking of Ruby and OpenSSL, recent versions of Ruby (sometime after 3.3.4) now appears to require a symlink (directory junction on Windows) from ssl to bin/etc/ssl. Directory junctions need to be an absolute path, so this is going to break anyone that was expecting to be able to zip the Ruby installation folder and create a portable distribution of ascli. I know this is not the ascli team's fault, but I suspect there will be other users of ascli in the same boat.

[laurent-martin]

Thanks,

We are looking at minimizing and not requiring msys2, as well as providing a single executable installation for ascli.
We'll let you posted here.

[laurent-martin]

I have tested the next version from here on Windows without Msys2:

https://eudemo.asperademo.com/download/aspera-cli-beta.gem

Let us know if it's ok for you too.

[junkimu]

I was able to install the beta gem without msys2.

[junkimu]

also verified I was able to update to 4.21.2 without msys2.