It’s just data
I’m scheduled to present on Ruby 1.9 at this year’s OSCON. My plans are to expand on this and report on both the excitement and ennui.
My tentative conclusion at this point based on observations of efforts to get products like Rails working on Ruby 1.9: the biggest obstacle to Ruby 1.9’s adoption is the sheer number of mostly working but essentially unmaintained gems that virtually everybody in the Ruby community depends on.
That is a great point. A similar kind of thing happened with PHP5. The PEAR community almost fell apart over the difference of PEAR:Error and PHP5’s new exceptions. As a result the libraries that OOP PHP coders were using were in a nasty state of flux and I think some fell by the wayside.
Posted by Jackson Miller atIs there any aggregate list of said gems?
I’d like to get involved with at least testing and simple patches... or is the issue that maintainers are completely AWOL and outside patches are greeted with stone silence?
Posted by Dan Fitch atI have not heard back from builder, rake, libxml2, and Ruby core. Some of those products are widely used.
Posted by Sam Ruby atThe first edition of This Week in Ruby received a warm welcome from the community. A week later, here we are with a second installment of the series. I’ll attempt to repeat these posts approximately every week, so feel free to follow along by...
Excerpt from Zen and the Art of Programming at