From: Tim Hunter <TimHunter@...>
Date: 2008-06-02T05:38:04+09:00
Subject: Re: tech writer seeks to build portfolio with a ruby project

Michael Litchard wrote:
> Okay, I've decided I want to see what I can do with Ruby's STDLIB.
> I wanted to poke around the gdbm source, but for the life of me could not
> find it. From what I can understand it's part of the core distribution, but
> I can't find a way to get it.
> The best I've been able to do so far is find binaries via netbsd's pkgsrc.
> 
> I may decide not to do gdbm first. But what I do want to come away with, is
> the right way to
> find any given source I need.

Download and unroll the source tarball. The builtin classes are defined 
in the top-level directory in source files that are very clearly named. 
That is, the String library is in string.c, Hash is in hash.c, etc.

Ruby-code libraries (i.e. ostruct) are in the lib subdirectory. The 
'gdbm' library is a C extension, so we go look in the ext subdirectory, 
where we find a directory named gdbm. In ext/gdbm there is gdbm.c. Voila!

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