Can Ruby stay ahead?

Ruby
21

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 12:54:36AM +0900, Tom C. wrote:

update, and reviews. (e.g. http://search.cpan.org/search?query=xml)
you should be using.
see:

  1. This is something for Eric/Luis/other RubyGem guys to weigh in on…
    surely this has come up before…

Number 8 already exists: gem install whatever -t

22

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Mark T. [email protected]
wrote:

There’s no doubt that CPAN is a great resource. These are a few of its
highlights:

  1. 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)

There is a reason Prawn has a cute name. It’s not ready yet. As the
current maintainer of PDF::Writer (more like janitor), I did not want
to create confusion by putting Prawn into the PDF namespace until I
felt it was production ready. When Prawn reaches 1.0, it will at the
very least be aliased to PDF::Document.

So without arguing your main point, Prawn is an example in which this
was intentional, not coincidental.

-greg

23

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 01:05:18AM +0900, Marcelo wrote:

What do you see?
HTML::TreeBuilder - Parser that builds a HTML syntax tree - metacpan.org
HTML-Tree-3.23 - Parser that builds a HTML syntax tree - metacpan.org
a network of resources.

But David did hint at something else that I see as a problem: a
strange type of hostility towards criticism that not even the Perl
community displays. Oh, and that strange notion that rubygems somehow
works in the same problem domain as CPAN does. If something, rubygems
provides a small subset of the functionality that CPAN does. The main
difference I see is integration.

When I was growing up, my parents told me that if I didn’t like my
dinner I would have to cook the next meal.

It sounds like you have a great recipe. :slight_smile:

24

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Mark T. [email protected]
wrote:

There’s no doubt that CPAN is a great resource. These are a few of its
highlights:

  1. 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)

There is a reason Prawn has a cute name. It’s not ready yet. As the
current maintainer of PDF::Writer (more like janitor), I did not want
to create confusion by putting Prawn into the PDF namespace until I
felt it was production ready. When Prawn reaches 1.0, it will at the
very least be aliased to PDF::Document.

So without arguing your main point, Prawn is an example in which this
was intentional, not coincidental.

-greg

25

On 13.04.2009 17:54, Tom C. wrote:

update, and reviews. (e.g. Search for "xml" - metacpan.org)
you should be using.
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

26

Robert K. wrote:

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

I certainly use it and I make sure to announce my projects there in
addition to RubyForge and ruby-talk. Also, looking at the homepage1,
you can see that project entries are being updated quite regularly —
just like on RubyForge news.

27

On Monday 13 April 2009 09:40:03 Mark T. wrote:

On Apr 12, 3:07 pm, David M. [email protected] wrote:

But since you’re probably going to get this answer from pretty much
everyone here, what does CPAN have that Rubygems lacks?

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.

True, this would be nice. The gems system should allow this – after
all,
there’s a single, cohesive website for all local gems (gem server).

  1. 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)

I’m ambivalent about this. I like CPAN namespaces, but I also like the
fact
that competing implementations are distinctively named – for instance,
Hpricot vs Nokogiri. Once a library is known, of course, the namespaces
are
usually coherent – for instance, Nokogiri-related stuff is in the
Nokogiri
namespace.

  1. A search engine that returns not only description, but also last
    update, and reviews. (e.g. Search for "xml" - metacpan.org)

Not that it’s a replacement (as it isn’t integrated into Gems), but
Github
does expose last update, and makes it quick to find forks, etc.

But yes, this would be useful.

  1. 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.

This seems to be provided by the rdoc, somewhat – again, in gem server
– but
again, that’s not as useful when looking at new modules.

  1. 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.

Ideally, these would be run on release candidates, too, right?

  1. 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.

This would be helpful. It’s easy to see how it might be abused, but the
paradox of choice can be irritating.

  1. The ‘cpan’ command comes with Perl. :slight_smile:

The ‘gem’ command comes with Ruby 1.9.

  1. 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).

I’m not sure Gems is to the point where this is necessary, in terms of
sheer
popularity.

It seems that this could be simplified as:

  1. search.cpan.org
  2. better docs, on average
  3. community (volunteer) services

1 and 3 should be easy to solve. 2 will take time.

Overall, neither is enough to make me ditch Ruby for Perl, and I doubt
I’d end
up using a Perl library over an equivalent Ruby one. But that is
compelling.
Thanks.