On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:11:19 +0900, Abe Vionas_MailingList
<mailinglist_abe / yahoo.com> wrote:

I don't have much to disagree with here -- I think that Ruby's support
for Windows leaves quite a bit to be desired, but will note that it's
mostly on things that have historically been troublesome on Windows in
any case (MySQL support, etc.) and that Win32 API support is extremely
strong, although we need more Win32 binary builds of things like
Win32::Event and Win32::Service. The following statement, however, is
(IMO) problematic:

> I for one will not even look at a library that hasn't had a release in 2004.

I work on and maintain several libraries. Text::Format hasn't been
changed -- because it does its job well and doesn't need further
changing, yet. MIME::Types has had minor changes to try to make it
more compliant with known lists, but it will see at most two updates a
year (and probably fewer than that when the three features I want to
add are put in: filemagic support, shared-mime support, and reading
existing mimecap files). Just because a program or library is old
doesn't mean that it's out of date. It means that few or no bugs have
been reported against the program or library and no feature requests
have been made to drive development.

Archive::Tar::Minitar -- never intended to be a full tar replacement
-- may see one more feature release and then only periodic releases to
make sure that it's compatible with the current version of Ruby. Why?
Because it simply *works*. It does what it's supposed to do. If it
doesn't work as it is and what it claims to do, then submit a bug!
Don't assume that because it hasn't been updated in 2004 that it's out
of date or unworkable.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com
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