Hello richard,

rl> If you're going to do the work to support something (paying people to
rl> develop)...


I just waited for someone like you :-)

I doubt that it is possible to pay someone. We need a (maybe many) large
company behind us to do so. And for them ruby must be used in a way that
they get profit in another way (consulting, inhouse software development)
etc.

But i doubt that there is any of them. Maybe people in some companies
use ruby (testing is popular) but the situation is more that this is
allowed but not supported.

Without these companies nothing will happen. Look at this newsgroup,
how many people are frequently posting here 50 ?  I'm doing this for
about 2 month now, and i know most of the people by name. Compare this
with python newsgroups and you see the difference.

So instead of spending money the people should spend time and help to
improve the libraries. There is much work to do, but yes - it's
work, sometimes really hard work. And thats why the situation is so worse,
people like to play with ruby in there freetime but they don't like to
work on projects resulting in hundrets of fucked up libraries that
never got beyond the proof of concept level.



-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's