From: Stian Haklev Date: 2007-03-14T17:15:10+09:00 Subject: IDEA: Ruby "offline" CD / DVD Hi all. I hope this is the appropriate place to post my idea. I have been using Ruby on and off for two years now, but especially lately as I have been implementing some personal projects, and modifying some Rails apps for our intranet, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Currently I am working for an NGO in Indonesia (I'm Norwegian, studying in Canada), and although we have a decent internet connection in the office, I do most of my coding at home in the evenings - without internet. And I have come to realize how much we depend on being online... not for the actual coding, but for all that surrounds it, whether it's looking up a library reference, downloading a new gem, googling an error message, downloading some source code to see how somebody else solved this problem. Often I come to a block, and I have to wait till the next morning before I can move on. I've partly solved this by pre-downloading a number of good resources, whether PDFs or even wgetting small sites that I might want to refer to. Internet is very expensive and slow in Indonesia, and almost nobody have it at home. I've met a bunch of CS students at the local Linux usergroup, and I was saddened to see how little they knew of basic stuff (whether Linux or programming, but at least they came, which is a great start). I never did CS, but I've been playing around with computers since I was 10. I firmly believe that having access to your own computer, and being able to sit up all night trying stuff out is the only real way of learning - all kinds of courses can help, but they are never enough. So I started thinking about producing some kind of a "Ruby ++" CD that could be sold really cheaply or handed out for free here and in other places. It would obviously contain some kind of installer/distribution of Ruby for most platforms (Win/Linux/Mac), but in addition some of the following: - a huge collection of gems - how big are all the gems together? enough for a DVD? or only the most useful ones - a bunch of big Ruby and RoR apps from Rubyforge etc - Rubybooks (like in the rubydoc bundle) - Functional and searchable webdumps of things like: the 10-20 most prolific Ruby bloggers, the Ruby-lang mailing list, Ruby quiz, etc (I'd personally also like to sneak in a pdf book about svn and maybe a few other tools as well). Previously I experimented a lot with getting offline access to Wikipedia dumps that are zipped without unzipping them first. I made a simple Ruby+webrick server that unzips and serves files on demand. It turned out to be way too slow for huge Wikipedia files (not Ruby but calling 7zip through the backtick), so someone from Spanish Wikipedia wrote an integrated server/7zip that only opens the 7z file once, and caches the index. Yesterday I wrote a first mockup of a Ruby script that accepts a URL, runs wget following all links in subdirectories, then scans all HTML/txt etc files with Ferret, and zips it all up to a format that is instantly usable. This way we could put a lot of documentation on the CD and have instantly useable - and searchable! Anyway, I'm throwing this out there, and wondering if it's a good idea, if you have any inputs etc. It might be hard to imagine how it is to be learning Ruby with no or almost no access to the network, but I can tell you that I would certainly pick up such a CD/DVD in a heartbeat, and I think it would be really useful. I'd love nothing more than having a generation of young creative minds in Indonesia (and other places) growing up churning out beautiful Ruby code! (This idea could obviously be extended to covering other programming languages etc, but I'm a Ruby guy). Also distribution has to be thought of, but there are lots of user groups for Ruby/Ubuntu/Linux etc in Indonesia. And we could put it up as an ISO, so other user groups in other countries could distribute it as they saw fit. Stian (ps please cc to my email since I might not be able to check this list often) -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.