From: Lyle Johnson Date: 2002-06-28T03:06:00+09:00 Subject: Re: help (ruby-talk ML) "Dave Thomas" wrote in message news:m21yas3bdf.fsf@zip.local.thomases.com... > That's great. In fact, changes to the basic Ruby interpreter and > runtime don't need a project on SF: all you have to do is check out > the source code from ruby-lang and set to it. I'm sure that Matz will > be happy to accept patches, and will likely make folks who produce > good work committers in the tree. At last year's RubyConf, in the sort-of "round-table" discussion at the end, someone asked a question along the lines: if Matz himself isn't especially interested in improving the Ruby core support for Windows, would he at least allow interested members of the Ruby community to make improvements to the core? The question was met with what was, at best, a "lukewarm" response, which I took at the time to mean he really didn't want anyone soiling Ruby with Windows-related code. But over the past year I've come to realize that it was probably just Matz being quiet and mysterious ;) I guess the question (which has come up before) is what really needs to be "fixed" in the Ruby core for Windows. I'm all for new and improved extension modules that make Ruby-on-Windows more powerful, but by definition those don't require modifications to the core. The only problem that immediately comes to mind is the "quirky" behavior of Ruby threads on Windows, and I'm not sure that anyone's nailed that one down conclusively. > I'd love to see a couple of Windows efforts get started in earnest: > one to beef up Windows support in the interpreter and its libraries, > and the other to have the community work towards building a standard > Windows distribution that we can all agree on. Pragmatic Programmers > may not have the resources of ActiveState, but as a community we have > considerably more. It just needs coordinating. See previous question about what "beefing up" Windows support in the interpreter and its libraries entails. Or maybe we both have the same question ;) And I definitely agree about farming out more of the work on building a Windows distribution. I for one will be glad to "adopt" some of the popular extensions and make sure that Windows binaries are available. Seems like we just need a central repository for such things.