We have a need for strong ical support in Famundo, and unfortunately all the ruby libraries for handling ical are nowhere near complete. A really great alternative is to use the well used and tested libical. This requires a wrapper that will let ruby use it, and the simplest way to do that, is to use SWIG to generate the wrapper, then compile it into an extension ruby can use.
Lucky for me, Rob Kaufman in this post contributed most of what's needed to get it going with SWIG. But it won't work on Linux. It seems it was compiled on a Mac, and trying to compile it on Linux just won't work.
Lucky for you, I have here the steps to make it compile on Linux (and probably any other system that supports the standard make tools). So lets jump right into the instructions.
1. Get the latest libical files and the zip file attached to Rob's post. You will also need to get the latest SWIG if it's not yet installed on your system.
2. Compile and install libical:
tar tar xif libical-0.26-6.aurore.tar.bz2
cd libical-0.26
./configure # you can run ./configure --help to see more options
make
sudo make install 3. Extract the files of the ruby SWIG based wrapper:
unzip libical-ruby.zip
cd libical-ruby/swig/
make clean4. Create an extconf.rb file to generate the makefile. The file should have the following in it:
require'mkmf'have_library("pthread")have_library("ical","icaltime_null_time")have_library("icalss","icalset_new_dir")create_makefile('LibicalWrap')5. Generate the needed wrapper file using swig: swig -ruby -o LibicalWrap.c ical.i
6. Run: ruby extconf.rb This should generate the needed Makefile. If it fails, you might not have the libraries from libical installed correctly. If that is the case, redo step 2 above, but use the ./configure command with different parameters, to point it to the correct lib directory. For example, on 64bit FC4, you might want to try with this:
./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64 --includedir=/usr/include
7. Compile and install the wrapper:
make clean
make
sudo make install8. We're done. You can now launch irb and type include 'LibicalWrap', and you are ready to go. With the libical-ruby.zip file, there are also some tests you can run on it to see if it works. And some ruby helpers to facilitate working with the library, as the library is C based, and so doesn't have nice class representations for ical objects.
Now that we have a good ical library, time to start using it. But that's outside the scope of this post.
Let me know if you have problems getting it to work. I'll be glad to help.
