A plea to all RubyForge maintainers

Please remember that there are a number of people who read the global
RubyForge RSS feed, which lists news updates to EVERY project. (OK,
honestly, I have no idea how many other people do this. But “one” is a
number too, and according to Sesame Street[1], I’m the most important
person in the whole wide world.)

It’s very nice to know that your brand-new project is in alpha, and that
you’re refactoring it so trunk may be unstable, and that it now includes
unit tests, and that it has experimental BeOS support.

But you know what I really want to know when I read your news update?

WHAT THE (*$#$( IS IT?

Thank you.

[1] Actually, it wasn’t Sesame Street at all. It was a series of
syndicated shorts commissioned by the U.S. Office of Child Development:

On Nov 26, 2007, at 14:20 , Jay L. wrote:

WHAT THE (*$#$( IS IT?

HAHAHA!!! I dunno how many times I’ve bitched about that… thank you.

WHAT THE (*$#$( IS IT?

HAHAHA!!! I dunno how many times I’ve bitched about that… thank you.

Wow, that’s a supercool time sink. Just for the hell of it, though,
doesn’t every RubyForge project have a short description string? Why
not just build that into the RSS feed?


Giles B.

Podcast: http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com
Blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
Portfolio: http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
Tumblelog: http://giles.tumblr.com

Jay L. [email protected] writes:

But you know what I really want to know when I read your news update?

WHAT THE (*$#$( IS IT?

Thank you.

And it’s not just the RSS–it’s the RubyForge front page!

Steve

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:09:41 -0500, Giles B. wrote:

Wow, that’s a supercool time sink. Just for the hell of it, though,
doesn’t every RubyForge project have a short description string? Why
not just build that into the RSS feed?

If they were all as well-writen and up-to-date as the rest of the
articles,
then yes, they’d be worth it. It often seems a place to quickly mention
wher you got toe ideas from, so as not to stoke anger over forking or
crediting…

Let’s look at a few.

RSpec, which I know and love, and which most here know at least enough
to
hate, says:

| RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby. It implements
| concepts described in Dave Astel’s first BDD article:
| http://tinyurl.com/yl8mzu

So to someone not following along the BDD-TDD spectrum drama, this say
“RSpec has ported BDD to Ruby, based in the same ideas from this guy’s
first book.” Woo! In marketing, now that’s what we call a “call to
action” - in the undergrad classes.

And that’s a MODEL project. Digging Deeper:

AngelMap 1.04 - lots of new features
Nov 26, 2007

|There are lots of new features in this release of AngelMap. - The map
| itself automatically sizes with the browser window - Lots of new
| filters to let you tailor the missions that are shown. You can
| specify things like maximum weight, distance or passengers. You
| can choose to hide multi-leg missions, and lots more. - New
| ability to search for missions where both the departure AND
| destination airports are within a given distance of your home airport.
|
| http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=19323

OK, so it’s some type of graphical map overlay thing with various
airports
and teams organizing missions. The strat of a wargame? Training for a
logistics solution? we don’t now. THeir main page summary, from a
different rubyforge page, says

| AngelMap is a Rails application that gets a feed of available Angel
| Flight missions and shows them on a Google Map. You can filter the
| list of missions by a distance or time window. See it running at
| http://angelmap.pfactor.com

OK, that’s… well, it slightly reduces the number of wild mental
stories
the reader might have otherwise had, but other than that, it doesn’t
tell
me anything about why I might want to use this in my own project and
what
else it could be used for, if I didn’t know what Angel Flight was.
There’s
no magic "In the process of designing a live feed handler for Angel
Flight,
a game popular in Luxembourg, we created a state-driven, high-performing
action handler that can carry out actions as a linear function of the
number of inputs… thus showing uses in blah blha blha.’

Help make RubyForge druy - talk about how you relate to the other
projects
there!

On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 09:35 +0900, Steven L. wrote:

Jay L. [email protected] writes:

But you know what I really want to know when I read your news update?

WHAT THE (*$#$( IS IT?

Thank you.

And it’s not just the RSS–it’s the RubyForge front page!

Yup, but those get filtered… only about a third of the news items
actually make it to the front page.

Yours,

tom