Sorry for later reply.

I wrote this to ruby-talk and comp.lang.misc:

At Sun, 20 Feb 2000 06:35:23 -0800 (PST),
in rubyapi2,
Joirin Couwe <bugathlon / yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> I wrote this to comp.lang.misc:
> 
> I'm going through Gtk+ -tutorial and practising Ruby
> at the same time. I have latest version of Ruby
> (1.5.2, 2000-02-18) and ruby-gtk-0.23. Gtk is rather
> old though. I haven't used Gtk ever and my Ruby
> experience is over 24h old :).
> 
> I'm not going to dive into gtk-related questions (yet)
> because I seem to find answers by reading the source
> :).

That's right.
And there is a bit of matters characteristic of Ruby/GTK.

> My questions:
> 
> 1) What is the intended way to get english docs for
> Ruby-Gtk to describe the API and hopefully up to date?
> 
> 
> Current docs seems to be generated by program
> rubyapi2. I haven't seen sources for this creature
> anywhere. Are they public? Where are they?

I haven't opened sources of the docs to the public.
because rubyapi is not unofficial doc format.

In addition, the official doc format `RD' and doc tools
`RDTools' have been under discussion, and documents in
unofficial rubyapi format cause confusion. (About RD, see the
articles in ruby-talk.)

For reference, I put current source tarball at:
    http://www.ueda.info.waseda.ac.jp/~igarashi/ruby/ruby-gtk-api-xml-20000228.tar.gz
This sources is written in encoding iso-2022-jp and so
you need Emacs or XEmacs with Mule extension or
some Japanese editor to read/edit it.

> Is it planned to extend functionality on that program
> and write API as comments in the sources? Or some
> other way possible? Since sources seem very regular it 
                            ~~~~~~~ are C sources or doc sources?
> should be possible to write program to extract all the
> useful information into the docs.

I have no idea on rubyapi now.

> 2) Is it possible to timestamp all the releases (to
> README too:)?

Do you mean that I put into the files like the line following?
  $Date: 2000/02/11 10:20:42 $
Well, I will do so till next release.

> 3) What is the way to update or contribute stuff?
> Sources (patches probably), docs, typos?

Please send it to me for the present.
You may well post it to ruby-talk if the stuff is a bit.

> 4) My gtkbrows.rb (ugly name) crashes after a while
> with following report:
> 
> ./rbbr_rb.rb:34:in `visitModule': stack level too deep
> (SystemStackError)
>         from ./rbbr_gtk.rb:78:in `visitModule'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:97:in `visitModule'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:96:in `each'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:96:in `visitModule'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:99:in `each'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:95:in `visitModule'
>         from ./rbbr_gtk.rb:78:in `visitModule'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:97:in `visitModule'
>          ... 4061 levels...
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:109:in `visit'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:109:in `each'
>         from ./rbbr_rb.rb:109:in `visit'
>         from gtkbrows.rb:44

I met with the above error, too.  rbbr_rb.rb dose not work well
for difference between ruby 1.4 and 1.5. I will examine, but
does anyone know how to fix it?

> 5) Is it worthwhile to write some interface for some
> missing class?
> 
> ToDo -list mentions to rewrite with Swig etc. So
> should I wait or should I go (for it)?

I wish that we get glue routines more automatically and so I
wrote it in ToDo. But we have already many (I don't know for
certain) glue routines. There are the way to make more
completely:

  - hand-write the rest of glue routines as we do till now.
  - generate glue routines from the file `gtk.defs' (included in
    GTK+ and PyGTK and etc). We need to write generator program.
  - SWIG/Ruby (but extension is required to SWIG/Ruby)

Automatic processes have the problem how we treat the API
specific to Ruby/GTK. We have to mapping methods and constants
name from C/GTK to Ruby/GTK in the end. I don't know which is
efficient in above options.

I welcome some ideas.

--
Hiroshi IGARASHI