Hi,

I have 2 somewhat related sorts of questions.

(1) Anyone have any idea of how many Ruby/GTK users there are? (And of these
users, how many make use of GLADE?) Are there more than 3 or 4 people out
there who are actively using Ruby/GTK? (Side note: It looks to me like
Perl/GTK development has actively revived, whereas Python/GTK development
seems to have stagnated.)

(2) Can we eventually set up some general mechanism that might make it
easier for people to make semi-educated guesses about the answers to such
questions in the future?

Here are my initial off-the-wall thoughts about (2). When RAA is either
enhanced or perhaps extended through RubyGarden, it would be nice to have a
chart simultaneously showing updates and number of downloads as a function
of time. (Think of this as sort of a self-generating and self-updating
survey.)

Also, I was wondering if for the 0.nnn sorts of version numbers, whether it
would be useful to have some sort of informally recommended convention for
them. For example, as a rough indication of how usable a package is relative
to the anticipated version 1.0, or for what % of the given API functions are
implemented, etc. For example, although it has been a long time since I
looked at Ruby/GTK, my (possibly mistaken) impression is that it was much
further along than a version number of 0.24 might seem to indicate. However,
without any sort of informal convention for such things, many people may
naturally tend to grossly understate such numbers to avoid seeming immodest,
thereby inadvertently turning away potential users.

It might also be useful for RAA entries to have an automatically created
WikiWiki page (perhaps on RubyGarden) to where others could provide
supplementary information about current developments and news and
experiences and examples of (or links to examples of) usage, so that the
onus isn't entirely on the original developer to deal with such things.

Regards,
Conrad