From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2004-10-28T01:03:41+09:00
Subject: Re: standard libraries [was: 1.8.2 - what can we do to help?]


On Oct 27, 2004, at 10:52, James Britt wrote:
> What crossed my mind (and I'm thinking out loud here, and I've not had 
> enough coffee, so take this all as food for thought) was that two 
> years ago there was a post decrying the state of Ruby documentation.  
> After a lengthy and interesting thread,  it was conceded that the docs 
> needed serious help, and the current Ruby Documentation Project was 
> born.
>
> So I wonder if there is a similar need for a Ruby Library Project, 
> where a deliberate, public effort is made to ensure that a) the 
> std-lib code is complete and maintained, with an assurance that the 
> code is just as supported as the base language, and b) (maybe) push to 
> improve or acquire 3rd-party libs such as are common in Perl & Python?

I don't think so. The problem with the RDP, and I anticipate with any 
RLP, is that the folks doing the work are not the folks writing the 
code. This often leads to disconnects between what is done and the 
intention of the library writer. It also means that we're always 
playing catch-up.

I would much rather see an atmosphere created where everyone 
understands that libraries must meet certain standards: versioning, 
testing, documentation, and so on, and the have the library writer put 
together the necessary resources to make their libraries compliant. In 
future, no library should be added to the core until it meets these 
standards.

One thing I like about gems is that it goes part way towards this. 
However, gems is for external libraries. I'd like to think that our 
internal ones could be as good.

Support for this would need to come from the top, which really means 
from Matz and a few others in Japan. If they got behind this, I think 
we'd see a rapid and dramatic improvement.



Cheers

Dave