From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2007-11-05T02:22:34+09:00
Subject: Ruby's Standard Library could use a lead maintainer

Hi folks,

During the Town Hall meeting with Matz at RubyConf, I asked him
several questions about Ruby's standard library.  I then caught up
with him later on and talked a bit about maintenance and progress
issues with the stdlib, and tried to come up with some suggestions.

Basically, Ruby's standard library has some great stuff in it, but
it's difficult to keep it organized, up to date, and representative of
what the Ruby community needs.  Some issues I'm thinking about that
currently exist are:

  - It is sometimes hard to contact the maintainers of some of the packages
  - We have several competing libraries within the standard lib, some
of them probably can be removed
  - There are some libraries that have become defacto standards (such
as FasterCSV) in the Ruby community, effectively deprecating the
stdlib which ship with Ruby.
-  Matz is probably too busy to worry about the stdlib :)

My suggestion is that perhaps someone with decent experience with the
standard library (not me :) could be selected to be a lead developer
for it.  This person wouldn't necessarily be responsible for
maintaining everything, they'd just be responsible for looking at the
state of the stdlib as a whole, rather than just the individual
packages.

This person might:

- monitor RCRs and make cases for strong ones to Matz
- help locate maintainers who have gone missing, or find replacements
in the event of orphaned code
- Keep an eye on community discussions and give feedback to the core,
as well as relay information about changes to the stdlib back to the
community
- Act as a decision maker when controversy arises.

I think that we might benefit a lot from having a person who could do
this sort of thing to make sure that the stdlib stays up to par with
the rest of ruby.

What do you all think?