From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2005-03-03T22:07:45+09:00
Subject: Re: RAA Status & The Problem with Ruby


On Mar 3, 2005, at 7:21 AM, Alexander Kellett wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2005, at 1:07 PM, Curt Hibbs wrote:
>> What is really bad about this is that many of the libs that are 
>> current are
>> *way* better than your average library, and a few are simply 
>> *brilliant*.
>> Many people (especially newcomers) don't know this because this 
>> brilliance
>> of drowned out in a sea of dead-ends.
>
> this issue comes up every few months.
> yet the last real answer (rpa) basically
> disappeared into the mist because people
> are far more interested in talking about
> the problems than actually taking some
> action. rpa provides the infrastructure
> needed to prevent the above from happening
> via its stated procedures with respect to
> test suites and api versioning.

I was never quite clear on how RPA was supposed to do this. Not to 
criticize the work of Mauricio and others, but it seemed to me to have 
a scaling problem: If you have a few volunteers trying to evaluate 
hundreds of Ruby libs, they're not going to have time to really 
evaluate them.

I'd like to see some sort of a website where Rubyists can sign on and 
then vouch for given libraries that they use from day to day. You'd be 
able to search for libs based on who else is using them--it'd be, at 
the least, a more automated way to find community opinion than emailing 
ruby-talk and asking "What do people use when they're trying to use 
Ruby with XYZ problem?"

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/