Building Redcar 0.3 under Arch Linux

According to its website, Redcar is "a programmer's editor for Gnome, written in Ruby and Vala. Redcar is designed to be compatible with Textmate bundles, including syntax highlighting, commands and snippets, and most keybindings are the same."

There are build instructions on GitHub, but they're skewed heavily towards the Debian-based Ubuntu distro. I use Arch, so here's what I did.

1. Install Ruby and Ruby Gems

yaourt -S ruby rubygems

Oh yes, and you'll need to install git for later, if you don't already have it, to grab the Redcar source.

2. Install other packages

Assuming you run GNOME (which you should if you intend to use Redcar) and Firefox (since it's got XUL), you'll need to install the following from the Arch repos:

yaourt -S ruby-gnome2 libwebkit ruby-gconf2

And from AUR (for no reason other than that they aren't in the normal repos):

yaourt -S oniguruma libgee ruby-dbus

3. Install required Ruby Gems

This bit can take a while:

sudo gem install oniguruma activesupport rspec cucumber hoe open4 zerenity

4. And the rest

... is the same as the official build instructions. For the record, the remaining steps follow.

Note that I didn't download or use those "few needed development" headers mentioned in the step 3 at the official build instructions. Looks like only 64-bit users need to worry about them.

5. Clone Redcar source

git clone git://github.com/danlucraft/redcar.git

6. Checkout the stable branch

cd redcar/
git checkout stable

7. Get Redcar submodules

git submodule init
git submodule update

8. Build Redcar

rake build

9. Start Redcar

./bin/redcar /optional/path/to/my/project

Done!

There. After an excessive amount of effort on my part, I finally have Redcar running under Arch Linux.

Why? Whaddya mean "why"?