From: itsnewsforme@... (M S)
Date: 2002-08-27T12:41:18+09:00
Subject: Ruby developers: help push RPKG development and usage forward!! (it is like CPAN.pm, only Ruby)

A big complaint from people looking into Ruby is that they don't see
anything along the lines of Perl's CPAN. Well, that is a problem that
can easily be fixed, given that work has already started with RPKG, a
Ruby packaging system based on Debian's.

  Check it out:

  http://www.allruby.com/rpkg/

  My question is: how come very few developers release their software
in RPKG format? Only a handfull of packages can be found (
http://www.allruby.com/rpkg/descriptions/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386-linux/index.html
), but the instructions for package construction are pretty simple (
http://www.allruby.com/rpkg/usage.html ). The project needs people to
help with debugging/development on platforms other than Linux,
although it looks like the code is pretty portable and has few
dependencies.

  C'mon! Let's get this hurdle out of the way of Ruby's acceptance
into the mainstream!

  Marcus

P.S. -- I am not involved with RPKG development at all, but I think
the project needs some advertising to overcome the huge inertia
associated with the Ruby community :) I promisse to try to create some
RPKG packages for some of the modules out there ... but C'mon people,
let's get behind RPKG, and maybe we can create CRAN, and Ruby will be
one step closer to being as popular as it deserves.