Nathan Weizenbaum <nex342 / gmail.com> writes:

> Are you asking me? If so, go right ahead. Also, for posterity's sake,
> I'm happy to assign the copyright for any ruby-mode code I write to
> the FSF (there was some talk a while back about incorporating
> ruby-mode into emacs proper).

That sounds great. It would need to be handled by the Emacs
maintainers. If you want to get your contributions accepted, you will
need to email Stefan Monnier (monnier / iro.umontreal.ca) and/or Chong
Yidong (cyd / stupidchicken.com) to get that handled. Unfortunately
ruby-mode.el cannot be integrated into Emacs until Matz and Nobu get
their copyright assignment sent in, and there is a feature freeze at the
end of July, so unless this is done quickly it may not make it in until
Emacs 24. =\

> I may have some ruby-mode patches in the future, as well, if you're
> interested. What are your thoughts on general housecleaning patches
> (normalizing the indentation, switching to more modern coding
> conventions, that sort of thing)?

I'm working on documenting the whole thing since the Emacs maintainers
have requested this as a prerequisite to getting it included in
Emacs. But I'd also like to work on cleaning up the codebase; according
to an earlier post in here there's a good deal of indentation code
(mostly undecipherable to me) that is redundant and needs to be removed.

Since I'm working on code I don't understand well, I'm writing a test
suite for this so such edits can be done without fear of breakage and
compatibility can be easily checked across several versions of Emacs. I
meant to mention this earlier with your heredoc patch; you might find it
useful for future hacking. Unfortunately I'm kind of in the middle of
some destabilizing changes in elunit[1], my test framework, but if
you're interested in working with it I can let you know when I wrap that
up. I would love to get some help with the test suite and maintenance.

Phil
http://technomancy.us

[1] - http://github.com/technomancy/dotfiles/tree/master/.emacs.d/elunit.el