Iconv.so dependency fails

debracey

Hello folks,

I've written a sketchup plugin which uses JSON to pass data back and forth between a web dialog and the plugin. Everything works great on my development machine (which also runs a Ruby 1.8.6 dev env) -- but when I go to install the plugin on a clean machine, it fails to load with the following error:

@unknownuser said:

Error Loading File configexporttool.rb
126: The specified module could not be found. - C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Tools/iconv.soError Loading File json.rb
126: The specified module could not be found. - C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Tools/iconv.so

If I navigate to the tools folder, iconv.so is sitting there -- so I'm not sure what's going on. I used dependency walker to check iconv.so to make sure I wasn't missing any dependencies, and found that MSVCRT-RUBY18.DLL was required. I placed that file in the tools folder and that cleared the dependency problem, but I still get that error on startup.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Dan

Dan Rathbun

1) Yes.. the "Tools" folder belongs to Google/Trimble.
Anything you place in there, can be removed by the installer / updater.
Stay out of that directory.

2) The "msvcrt-ruby18.dll" IS the Ruby interpreter, which IS loaded and running. A copy distro's with SketchUp, and resides in the application directory along with "sketchup.exe".
If it wasn't already loaded and running, then how could the Ruby require() method be called and raise the exception you are seeing ??

3) It's best to just install a Full Ruby library, using the "one-click" installer, and leave the Ruby libraries in there normal place, where they can be maintained via RubyGems, etc.
Pickin' and choosing more than the Win32API.so, or win32ole.so library files, and copying them to "Plugins", is a bad idea. "so" (source object) files do not carry version information, like DLL files. So when you take them out of a versioned folder system, we can no longer tell what version they are.

Do yourself a favor, and just install Ruby on both machines, and use a script like my "loadpaths" script, to add paths into $LOAD_PATH, to the normal Ruby library folders.

See my post: [ Code ] Ruby LOAD PATHs script (Win32) : ver 3.0.1

thomthom

@dan rathbun said:

Yes.. the "Tools" folder belongs to Google/Trimble.
Anything you place in there, can be removed by the installer / updater.
Stay out of that directory.

+1

SketchUp documentation explicitly mentions Plugins as the folder to use.
https://developers.google.com/sketchup/docs/loading

Dan Rathbun

Also.. I think that "iconv.so" is one of those library files, that is extremely cranky about the having all loaded libraries be version matching.

In addition, the system must have the proper version of the Microsoft VC runtime installed. I think for Ruby v1.8.6-p287, that would the 2005 runtime?

So you cannot just take the "iconv.so" from say, v1.8.7-p299 and expect it to load into Ruby 1.8.6-p287.

Once you have all the "version" ducks in a row, load "iconv.so" by calling it via require, with no file extension, ie:

require("iconv")

debracey

Thanks for the tips,

Unfortunately I cannot simply package a Ruby distribution, so I'm sorta stuck here. I really don't need iconv at all for what I want to do -- so I just did a grep on all my dependencies and removed the references to iconv, that seems to have resolved the problem. (Not exactly the best solution, but it'll work for what I need.)

Dan Rathbun

@debracey said:

Unfortunately I cannot simply package a Ruby distribution, so I'm sorta stuck here.

We really don't want that either. Normally, you just list a full Ruby install, as a requirement, and give the link to the Windows One-Click Installer (as I did in my Load Paths topic.) Then you use a script like mine, or in yours check that $LOAD_PATH contains paths to the standard Ruby lib directories.

@debracey said:

I really don't need iconv at all for what I want to do -- ...

If it's Unicode file paths you are worried about, TIG posted a beta called PCFileTools. They don't seem to be a problem on the Mac.

nikus_knx

Hey I get the same problem,
Just copy iconv.dll from C:\Ruby\bin in the directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google SketchUp 8 to fix the problem.