From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2004-12-11T05:21:14+09:00
Subject: [REQ] Development Assistance

As some of you know, I have several libraries that I develop and
maintain. Some of these libraries are in need of some developer
examination and possible enhancement. The restriction for the
assistance I'm seeking is as follows:

  1. All features must be pure Ruby. These libraries do not
     contain C extensions for a reason.
  2. The features must be able to be integrated with the
     libraries as licensed.

If anyone is interested in helping with any of these, please let me
know.

= MIME::Types (Perl Artistic + Ruby + GPL)
I desire to add two new features to this, but currently lack the
time to do it before June 2005 at the earliest.

1. FreeDesktop.org's shared-mime-info library support
   <http://qurl.net/84>. This must be cross-platform and have
   cache-security concerns so that an application can set up a
   local cache but not use the system information as the store
   for that cache.
2. File magic support -- this must be pure Ruby, not a binding
   to libmagic. This may be implemented using the magic database
   installed on various operating systems, a default value, or
   information in the 

= Archive::Tar::Minitar (Ruby + GPL)
I would like to make this a bit more feature complete, including.

  1. Symbolic link and hard link support for all platforms.
  2. Add/remove files from a tar.

There are some places that the code could be cleaned up as well,
because I think that I close some helper objects too aggressively
(e.g., Zlib::GzipWriter objects are closed instead of finished).

This will be something that I won't have time to look at until
probably August 2005.

= Diff::LCS
I'm looking at this much sooner (January 2005) because I need it for
Ruwiki 0.10.0 and later.

1. Patch/diff merging. Take two patches that refer to versions of
   the same base document and merge them into a single patch. That
   is, if I have three versions of document A (A1, A2, A3) and get
   diffs between A1 and A2 (D1) and A2 and A3 (D2), I should be able
   to merge D1 and D2 so that I could then patch A1 to A3 in a
   single pass.
2. Three-way diff and merge.

= PDF::Writer
Any help here would be appreciated. My other projects are still
taking priority over this and there are many things that can and
should be done to improve image handling and other features as well
as making the API more like that which we have come to expect from
Ruby libraries.

Thanks,
-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca