From: Benjamin Peterson <bjsp123@...>
Date: 2002-06-28T00:44:50+09:00
Subject: Re: help (ruby-talk ML)


><... bits about i18n and text processing snipped ...>

>I will take your word for it that these are
>significant roadblocks for
>you and others. I typically deal with English (ASCII)
>text exclusively
>and so it hasn't been an issue for me -- yet.

I accept that Ruby's linguistic limitations are not a
problem for a majority of users.  But then, people who
might get text from any old country can't *be*
users...

>Just curious, what would be the significance
(benefit) of having an
>ActiveState Windows distribution versus some other
Windows distribution?

There is no particular magic virtue in the name
'ActiveState', but there were two things needed that
ActiveState could have provided:

Resources:  The boost ActiveState gave to Perl was
considerable -- a serious amount of resources were
added to the Perl project, leaving Perl's core people
free to work on the language secure in the knowledge
that the Windows hordes would be able to use it all
right out of the box.  The Pragmatic Programmers have
done a great job, but they have nothing like the
resources to spend on this that ActiveState gave to
Perl.  

Enough clout to make their distro the standard:  Most
people search for 'ruby windows binary' and come up
with all sorts of horrible things.  The PragProg
distro *may* be the best Windows distro, (though
ActiveScriptRuby is important), but it is only one of
*four* links to win32 Ruby distros on the
ruby-lang.org download page.  It feels futile to try
and add windows-specific functions when there are so
many competing distros many of which will never
incorporate any new functionality.  With ActiveState
Perl, though, it was possible to add lots of goodies,
because you could pretty well assume the users would
have them in their distro.


>The most recent Ruby installer for Windows (from Andy
Hunt) included
>Ruby/DBI, DBD/ODBC, DBD/Postgres, DBD/MySQL and
DBD/Oracle.

So it does.  A thank you to Andy Hunt and a slap on
the wrist to myself.

>But for things that do depend on
>modifications to the core it would be nice to have
>some more concrete
>plans to work with.

You accidentally pasted the words 'more concrete' into
your mail :)

You are right when you say that many of the features I
mentioned are not critical for the majority of users
(we'll never have threads and I can live with that). 
However, the problem I hoped to draw attention to was
not the absence/desirability/necessity of particular
features, so much as the need, if Ruby is to grow and
spread any further, to move to a more open model of
software development.  



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