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I'm on board.
Where do we start ?

Re-face RubyForge to apply the changes you suggest?   Who's maintainer for
RubyForge ?

Peter Fitzgibbons
(847) 687-7646
Email: peter.fitzgibbons / gmail.com
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On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Martin DeMello <martindemello / gmail.com>wrote:

>
> http://blog.jrock.us/articles/You%20are%20missing%20the%20point%20of%20Perl.pod
>
> Great article on perl and cpan. I was all ready to say "yeah, ruby has
> libraries too - maybe not the tens of thousands cpan has, but i can
> usually find what i want" until I read this paragraph:
>
>   The important thing about Perl is that we have a culture of writing
> good libraries. No Perl programmer would write a few lines of code,
> post it to a blog, and call it a "library". Everyone feels obligated
> to create a CPAN distribution, with documentation (sometimes a bit on
> the minimal side, but not everyone is a writer), a test suite, a
> Makefile, etc. I'm not sure why, but this always happens. I think it's
> because there is a strong convention, and tools that make following
> the convention easy.
>
> He's right - there really is nothing in the ruby culture/toolset that
> encourages everything shared to be *properly* shared. Hoe and friends
> [http://nubyonrails.com/articles/tutorial-publishing-rubygems-with-hoe]
> are a great step forward, but their use doesn't seem to be widespread
> yet. At the very least, an interesting thing to ponder.
>
> Some ideas I had:
>
> 1. rubyforge should encourage an ecosystem of scripts that works with
> it; right now I can't even *find* such scripts other than via "gem
> search" (I've filed a suggestion with rubyforge about this).
> 2. a majority of the projects on rubyforge (mine included, i admit)
> have no documentation. on the other hand, the *landing page* of a cpan
> project is the documentation. rubyforge's default landing page seems
> to contain a lot of information that seems more suited to a sidebar.
> 3. perhaps rubygems could support commands like "gem readme", "gem
> changelog", "gem todo" and "gem examples" to encourage people to fill
> in such documentation where appropriate
>
> martin
>
>

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