From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-06-12T03:16:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Switch to .ruby extension?

Karl von Laudermann wrote:

> The current convention for Ruby source file names is to end them with
> a .rb extension. This strikes me as too minimalistic. Why not .ruby?
> 
> File extensions of more than three characters are very commonplace,
> now that Windows supports them. HTML files generally have a .html
> extension; you very rarely see .htm anymore. And Java source and
> object files have .java and .class extensions, respectively. "ruby" is
> only two more letters than "rb", but I think it's clearer and more
> aesthetically pleasing.
> 
> So, I propose a change in the convention from .rb to .ruby. Now, I'm
> not suggesting that everyone change all of their existing scripts and
> libraries, or even the files in the Ruby distribution. That would be
> excessive for such a small thing. But, for example, the Windows
> installer could associate both .rb and .ruby files with ruby.exe, and
> we could start using .ruby in new projects.

The package installer for Blogtari uses the .ruby extension.

This came out of necessity; I moved from distributing the app as a 
tarball to deploying a self-extracting Ruby script that prompts the user 
for configuration details, writes out (or updates) the config file, and 
installs the program.  But whereas serving up *.tgz worked fine, serving 
up *.rb from the web server caused it to execute on the server :).

While there are any number of workarounds for this, I opted to use the 
.ruby extension and tell Apache to serve it as a particular MIME type so 
that browsers would prompt the user to save it to disk.


Jamess