From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-03-19T23:05:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code 2008?

On Mar 19, 2008, at 12:16 AM, Chiyuan Zhang wrote:

> Is there any project ideas collected? Maybe something about Ruby 1.9,
> Rubinius etc.

I'm sure we can brainstorm some for you.

Regarding your Ruby 1.9 idea:  many libraries don't work correctly yet  
in Ruby 1.9.  You could come up with a list of favorites that don't  
work and offer to patch them for Ruby 1.9.  I think that could be  
quite a resource to the community.  I got this idea from Greg Brown  
who may be doing a similar project soon, but I think there are more  
than enough libraries to go around.

Beyond that, here are a few other random ideas:

* There's been a lot of talk about better documentation tools lately.   
I believe Eric Hodel is working on revamping RDoc.  Perhaps you could  
see what you could do to help with that.  James Britt has also looked  
at better ways to assemble the documentation for ruby-doc.org, so that  
may be another place you could help out.
* I've recently had need of a multiprocess event safe logger.  What I  
mean by that is that I have two processes writing to the same log  
file.  They may log five things for each event.  In the log file, I  
would prefer the resulting ten entries not be interleaved.  You could  
provide a start event method and an end event method and only add  
events to the log file after the event ended.  This is more  
complicated than it sounds since you will want to deal with large  
logging data for a single event (probably using Tempfile), badly  
behaved programs that don't manage to call the end event method, long  
running events, etc.
* Daniel Berger has requested a pure Ruby implementation of zlib a few  
times now.  This might give new options for Windows installers.

I do encourage you to think up your own ideas though.  I've been a  
mentor for the last two years and I can easily say that the  
applications for unique ideas were generally more appealing.  There  
are two reasons for that.  The first is that lots of applications come  
in for the ideas we post publicly, so you're competing with a lot of  
people who want to do the exact same thing.  The other is that you  
will just be more creative when running with your own idea.  Don't  
hesitate to latch onto one of your own needs and run with it.

James Edward Gray II