From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T06:10:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Can Ruby stay ahead ?

On 13.04.2009 17:54, Tom Copeland wrote:
> 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.

But note that there is RAA already!  It seems to be mentioned fewer 
times recently, which makes me wonder whether people still use it.

Kind regards

	robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end