From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-02-19T21:33:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Don't let this happen to Ruby, pleeeeease?

Dňa Sobota 18 Február 2006 21:48 Glenn Smith napísal:
> Perhaps the problem is more complex but I'm a simpleton, I just want to go
> somewhere, download Ruby and start running it.  And like most of the world,
> I want to do this on Windows.
>

Noone's stopping you.

> Anyway, underneath it says: "The source is
> <URL:ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz><ftp://ftp.ruby-lan
>g.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz>, the md5sum is
> bd8c2e593e1fa4b01fd98eaf016329bb, and filesize is 4,312,965 bytes."
>
> Well, woopy-doo.  I couldn't care less what an md5sum is (I'm only vaguely
> aware of what it means, and I've been using and programming PC's over 20
> years).
>

<troll>
Under a fluffy, warm rock?
</troll>



> I want a windows installer.  Somebody else probably wants a Mac installer.
> Maybe an RPM for Linux flavour 1, a .DEB for flavour 2 and so on (alright,
> the Unix people can just run MAKE if they want).  I don't have much recent
> knowledge of hacking C, I just wanna use Ruby.  And more, I wanna know
> what's new in this release.
>

The ruby-lang.org site doesn't maintain binary builds. Big deal. Read on.

> Where's the "what's new"? Embedded in some text file on an ftp-site
> somewhere, or perhaps it's in the tar file.  OK, so I know how to go look,
> but there isn't anything even in the announcement that tells me to do that.
> What if I was a relative-newbie? A youngster looking for a fun-new language
> to teach themselves programming?
>

Everyone who's ever given more than fifteen minutes to getting an open source 
library to work knows the changelogs are bundled with the download by 
convention. And since looking for "what's new" presumes the user has already 
had "old" in hand, that's not an issue.

Said youngster is warmly welcome to post to here, comp.lang.ruby, the Ruby 
Forum, or the irc channel. He'll probably get all the help he asks for and 
then some. Treading forums is a survival ability gained early on in the 
programmer's life.

Truth be said, the ruby-lang website could use a minor touchup to somehow draw 
attention to the primary form of support for all things Ruby. I have this 
mild hallucination of one in the works being mentioned in a recent post 
*grin*.

> Am I asking a lot?  Well pop over to python.org (and not python.com like I
> keep making the mistake of going to!) and it's there - new release plus a
> "what's new", same for the previous two releases.  Installers for Windows
> (32 and 64-bit!), and tar.gz's for everybody else (maybe now Mac's are
> based on unix it's easy for them just to run "make"?).
>

Ahem. Google for "Ruby Installer'. Unsurprisingly, a site hosting a Ruby 
installer for windows comes up as the first result. Case closed.

Bottom line: moan less, do more of everything else. The latter actually gets 
you somewhere, and saves my brain center for flaming some strain.

David Vallner