From: Rob Muhlestein <rob@...>
Date: 2007-01-09T11:10:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Tattle - The Ruby Census

Chad Fowler wrote:
> Greetings and Happy New Year, Rubyists!
>
> At the first Rails Edge conference (http://therailsedge.com), Jim
> Weirich, Bruce Williams, and I were chatting about how to improve the
> RubyGems platform-specific behavior, when we realized that it would be
> really helpful to have more info about the install footprint of the
> Ruby community at large.
>
> So instead of going right into hacking RubyGems as was our plan, we
> created a little census tool and an accompanying web site to help us
> collect information.  Most of the info we collect is from
> Config::CONFIG, with the addition of the RubyGems version.
>
> We know this information will help the implementers of RubyGems, and
> we hope it will also help Ruby implementers and library developers as
> well.
>
> To install:
>
> $ sudo gem install tattle
>
> To submit your info:
>
> $ tattle
>
> If you want to see what would be posted before posting, you can do:
>
> $ tattle report
>
> The information gets posted to http://tattle.rubygarden.org.  You can
> view the posted data with your web browser at that URL.

This is a great idea.

Are there plans to allow submission of a semi-anonymous collection of
internal census data from potentially thousands of internally managed
clients? Perhaps some way to submit to you directly a data file
containing a summation of the data submitted individually to tattle.

That --platform option sounds very interesting as does the whole
discussion of footprint.