Hi@jcupitt ,

as discussed in#331 (seecomments), we have the need of more fine-grained control on the libvips library version to be used.

When you install theruby-vips gem on Windows, it would automatically (andunconditionally) install the latest availablelibvips dependency to your msys2 ruby devkit environment (seehere in ruby-vips.gemspec).

There is the%RUBY_DLL_PATH% environment variable which you can point to an external libvips installation (e.g. obtained fromlibvips/build-win64-mxe releases), but this only works when there is no libvips installation present in the msys2 ruby devkit environment.

So in order to make use of%RUBY_DLL_PATH% to get control of the libvips version being installed, you need to make sure that there is no parallel libvips installation in the msys2 ruby devkit environment. But here's the catch: every time you re-install or update theruby-vips gem, you will get an msys2 libvips installation as a side effect, breaking the use of the external libvips version in%RUBY_DLL_PATH%.

One solution to this could be to provide a possibility to opt-out of the installation of "msys2_mingw_dependencies" in the gemspec (e.g. via an env var likeSKIP_MSYS2_MINGW_DEPENDENCIES=1 or so).

What do you think? Does that sound feasible / sensible? Do you have other suggestions on how to enable better control over the libvips library version?

Cheers,
Torben