From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-11-05T12:31:37+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby's Standard Library could use a lead maintainer Gregory Brown wrote: > On 11/4/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > >> Well, I think this is one of those, "Oh gosh yes ... that's a *really* >> great idea ... but *I* just don't have the time" situations. The code >> base is growing, there are more developers, etc. Somehow all the major >> open source projects manage to get things done, and I doubt very >> seriously if Ruby will turn out to be any different in that respect. >> > > Does anyone have some knowledge they can share of how different open > source languages handle their standard libraries? That could be > helpful, and if we don't have that information, I could probably do a > little research... > > well, I think the R community does a pretty good job, but it's been around a long time, has a tightly-knit core developer set and a narrower focus -- mostly statistics -- than Ruby. In other words, more graduate students to dump on. ;) CPAN is probably the largest and most comprehensive. I've really only used CPAN, CRAN (the R repository) and RubyGems. What I can say is that all three are equally good at packaging and integrating package management into the language. In Perl, you can type "cpan" at a command prompt (Linux, Cygwin or Windows) and enter the package manager. And for R, you can open up R and type > install.packages("reshape") and it will give you a list of mirrors and then install the "reshape" package and all its dependencies. The R FAQ clearly states in bold letters that all packages must have a maintainer and that if you have a problem with the package, contact that maintainer. So maybe the solution is to move unmaintained packages out of core until they get a maintainer.