From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2009-02-03T18:08:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Native gem roundup!

Tom Cloyd wrote:
> As someone with a social survey research background, I want to advise 
> you that this is an extremely poor way to get your question answered. If 
> you're not serious about getting a good answer, your request is very 
> close to list-noise. If you are, then you need a decent sample OR all 
> the parametric data (i.e., don't sample it - get it all).

I disagree. I think the people most likely to respond to a mailing-list 
request are the exact people I'm looking to reach. Did it occur to you 
that perhaps I know there are download stats for all gems that I could 
mine? I'm looking to gauge the importance of gems to vocal mailing-list 
participants directly, by posting a general message here and seeing who 
responds. And I've gotten a lot of great responses, both on-list and 
off. If I wanted an accurate count of gem downloads (no doubt inflated 
by older gems including dev-time libraries as runtime dependencies) I 
certainly could get that. But people coming out and saying "I really 
need X" is far more interesting.

So please, others, feel free to reply with what X you find important.

And Tom, thanks for your input. What native extensions do you find useful?

- Charlie