From: Tom Copeland <tom@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T00:54:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Can Ruby stay ahead ?

On Apr 13, 2009, at 10:40 AM, Mark Thomas wrote:

> There's no doubt that CPAN is a great resource. These are a few of its
> highlights:
> 1. A single, cohesive website that categorizes all modules (http://
> search.cpan.org/) for easy browsing.
> 2. A module namespace convention that helps one know what the module
> does, rather than 'cute' names (Test::MockClass vs. Mocha,
> PDF::ReportWriter vs. prawn, etc)
> 3. A search engine that returns not only description, but also last
> update, and reviews. (e.g. http://search.cpan.org/search?query=xml)
> 4. Page for each distribution with links to the classes and files,
> dependencies, test results, etc. (Example: http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Twig-3.32/)
> Much better interface than Rubyforge.
> 5. Automated tests run by a cadre of volunteers. New releases of
> modules are tested upon release on a variety of Perl versions and
> operating systems. See the test reports and Perl/Platform Version
> Matrix links on the distribution page.
> 6. Ratings. When there are many options for a particular task, seeing
> the star ratings can help you whittle down the options to the best.
> The overall highest rated modules tend to be the best-practice ones
> you should be using.
> 7. The 'cpan' command comes with Perl. :)
> 8. The 'cpan' command has a test harness and runs the tests before
> installation. If a module doesn't pass its tests on your platform, it
> is not installed.
> 9. CPAN has a very rich set of mirrors (http://mirrors.cpan.org/) and
> you can configure your local cpan command to use a subset, say a
> primary and a backup (good for environments requiring firewall rules
> to be in place for external access).

That's a good list of features, thanks for putting it together.  Let's  
see:

1.  Tricky one since there's more than one big source of gems.  Well,  
there are two main ones - github and gems.rubyforge.org - plus a host  
of others.  We could build such a site for RubyForge... would be  
interesting.

2.  RubyForge has a "trove" that lets folks categorize their  
projects... we could work this into a new site somehow.

3.  This would be nice indeed.

4.  Same as # 3 :-).  A lot of this information is there in the gem  
spec or inside the gem itself; would need to extract and render it.

5.  Not sure if there's an effort like this going on anywhere in the  
Ruby world.

6.  Could work this into RubyForge somehow if folks found it useful.

7.  I think RubyGems is shipping with newer versions of Ruby (?)

8.  This is something for Eric/Luis/other RubyGem guys to weigh in  
on... surely this has come up before...

9.  We do need better mirror status visibility.  I owe Ryan Davis an  
API for RubyForge so's he can fetch a mirror list.  Would make sense  
to have a page on RubyForge for that as well.

All good stuff!

Yours,

tom