Re: Ruby's Standard Library could use a lead maintainer

On Nov 4, 2007, at 11:22 AM, Gregory Brown wrote:

> 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.

This is an interesting issue.  It will surely not be easy to address  
all concerns, but I think talking about it is healthy.

> Some issues I'm thinking about that currently exist are:
>
>   - It is sometimes hard to contact the maintainers of some of the  
> packages

With TextMate, we do try to keep a current contact email address in  
each bundle.  These addresses are available to the users and we  
encourage them to take their issues there first, but we try to  
function as a backup if that plan doesn't work for whatever reason.

I'm not suggestion Ruby adopt this strategy.  I'm just sharing what  
I've seen elsewhere.

I do believe this is a fairly big issue.  I mean we currently have a  
thread about unbundling YAML and people are concerned by that  
possibility.  We do need to find someway to at least maintain what's  
there.

>   - We have several competing libraries within the standard lib, some
> of them probably can be removed

I believe the current plan is to remove some of these and I'm glad to  
see that step being taken.  I think we're making progress here.

>   - There are some libraries that have become defacto standards (such
> as FasterCSV) in the Ruby community, effectively deprecating the
> stdlib which ship with Ruby.

Some standard libraries do have bugs or performance issues.  In some  
cases there are libraries that do the same job better or faster.

Sometimes this is hard to judge though.  Sometimes competing  
libraries each have their strengths and it's hard to call one better.

Even in cases where there is a clearly better option, replacing a  
standard library is a tricky thing to do.  Most people will likely be  
angry when Ruby starts breaking their code with regular updates, just  
because we wanted to swap out a library.  I think Matz tries to be  
conservative with the changes for this reason.

This is a hard problem to solve.

> 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 is a pretty neat idea, though it does sound like a hard job.   
I'm having a little bit of a hard time seeing where this person fits  
into the current structure.  That doesn't mean it's not a good idea,  
just that I think the role would need to be pretty well defined to  
avoid people getting upset by the person's actions.

> This person might:
>
> - monitor RCRs and make cases for strong ones to Matz

The current RCR process seems to be struggling.  I think that process  
probably needs fixes, before it can be incorporated.

> - help locate maintainers who have gone missing, or find replacements
> in the event of orphaned code

Typically, the best way to find a maintainer is to grab someone who  
starts submitting patches.  Of course, without a maintainer, I think  
a lot of current patching efforts are being ignored.  We may need to  
think about this a little.

> - 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

We probably need to strengthen the feedback loop all around.  This is  
the easiest point, but I do think it's valuable.

> - Act as a decision maker when controversy arises.

This would be tough.  It's hard to know what's the best choice in  
many situations that arise with maintenance of the standard library.   
No one wants to make a bunch of Ruby developers angry.  Clearly  
discussion would be needed, at the minimum and Matz probably needs to  
be involved on some level, for major decisions.

> 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?

The above is just my opinions.  I could be wrong on any number of  
things.

On the whole, the idea is interesting.  I'm not sure I completely  
understand the role yet, but I'm for anything that makes things  
easier for the developers.  I think it's at least a great topic of  
discussion and I'm glad you brought it up.

James Edward Gray II