On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:09:41 -0500, Giles Bowkett wrote:

> Wow, that's a supercool time sink. Just for the hell of it, though,
> doesn't every RubyForge project have a short description string? Why
> not just build that into the RSS feed?

If they were all as well-writen and up-to-date as the rest of the articles,
then yes, they'd be worth it.  It often seems a place to quickly mention
wher you got toe ideas from, so as not to stoke anger over forking or
crediting.. 

Let's look at a few.  

RSpec, which I know and love, and which most here know at least enough to
hate, says:

| RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby. It implements 
| concepts described in Dave Astel's first BDD article: 
| http://tinyurl.com/yl8mzu

So to someone not following along the BDD-TDD spectrum drama, this say
"RSpec has ported BDD to Ruby, based in the same ideas from this guy's
first book."  Woo!  In marketing, now that's what we call a "call to
action" - in the undergrad classes.

And that's a MODEL project.  Digging Deeper:

AngelMap 1.04 - lots of new features
Nov 26, 2007

|There are lots of new features in this release of AngelMap. - The map 
| itself automatically sizes with the browser window - Lots of new 
| filters to let you tailor the missions that are shown. You can 
| specify things like maximum weight, distance or passengers. You 
| can choose to hide multi-leg missions, and lots more. - New 
| ability to search for missions where both the departure AND 
| destination airports are within a given distance of your home airport.
|
| http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=19323

OK, so it's some type of graphical map overlay thing with various airports
and teams organizing missions.  The strat of a wargame?  Training for a
logistics solution? we don't now.  THeir main page summary, from a
different rubyforge page, says 

| AngelMap is a Rails application that gets a feed of available Angel 
| Flight missions and shows them on a Google Map. You can filter the 
| list of missions by a distance or time window. See it running at 
| http://angelmap.pfactor.com

OK, that's... well, it slightly reduces the number of wild mental stories
the reader might have otherwise had, but other than that, it doesn't tell
me anything about why I might want to use this in my own project and what
else it could be used for, if I didn't know what Angel Flight was.  There's
no magic "In the process of designing a live feed handler for Angel Flight,
a game popular in Luxembourg, we created a state-driven, high-performing
action handler that can carry out actions as a linear function of the
number of inputs.. thus showing uses in blah blha blha.'


Help make RubyForge druy - talk about how you relate to the other projects
there!



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Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
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