This is a set of patches maintained by me, Charlie Somerville, that fix up old versions of Ruby so they compile and run on modern systems.
I have access to Linux and Mac OS X machines. All the patches are supported on these platforms.
There's no guarantee these patches will work on other platforms (but if they do then that's great!)
Go to http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ and find an old version available for download that also has a patch here. If you can't find a patch for the version you'd like to run, open up an issue and I'll see what I can do.
Download the source and extract it. Download the patch and pipe it into patch -p1.
For example, here's how you'd build ruby-1.0-971225 (released Christmas 1997):
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.0/ruby-1.0-971225.tar.gz
tar xvf ruby-1.0-971225.tar.gz
patch -p1 < /path/to/ruby-1.0-971225.patch
./configure
make
If a patched Ruby fails to compile on your machine, please open an issue and tell me what operating system and compiler you're using, as well as what Ruby version you're trying to build.
Happy patching!
The configure script distributed with this Ruby version is too old to guess your particular system. You must explicitly tell it your system type with the --host flag.
If you do not know your host triple, you can leave it blank by specifying --host=.
Older versions of Ruby are not very 64 bit friendly. Try adding -m32 to your CFLAGS.