RubyForge and RubyGems and GemCutter

Ruby
1

Hi all -

This has been announced in various forums, but we should have sent a
message here in the initial flurry. To summarize, some major gem
indexes are going to be consolidated - GemCutter and
gems.rubyforge.org will move to rubygems.org and form one massive gem
index. This index will be fronted by Nick Quaranto’s excellent
GemCutter rails app. This app will be running on Ruby Central’s
infrastructure at Rackspace.

The entire announcement, more details, and a comment thread with some
discussions here:

http://update.gemcutter.org/2009/10/26/transition.html

As part of this transition, RubyForge is going to be slowly stood
down. It won’t simply be turned off, of course; we could see it
staying in read-only mode for quite a while. But that’s where things
are headed. The community hub functions of RubyForge will not go
away. Community features that RubyForge uniquely provides (or should
provide) will be added to the source base of the app that GemCutter
started with and will be maintained on github.

This is a change; but it’s one that we at Ruby Central feel is
important. We want to provide the community with what it needs. With
services that Github, the new SourceForge and Google Code provide we
feel that source management, mailing lists and bug tracking are being
better provided by others. We want to focus on community features.
We will be developing those quickly and that will all hub at
RubyGems.org
.

Yours,

Rich Kilmer
Ruby Central

2

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Richard K. [email protected]
wrote:

Hi all -

Hello Richard,

As I understand this: files packages and releases will disappear.
Mailing lists will require be moved, etc.

This is what defines “community features”, right?

I’ve commented on that thread that not everything hosted at RubyForge
is a gem, and because of that doesn’t fit into “RubyGems” domain.

Also, there are projects that still uses CVS as repository, not to
mention subversion which will need to transition to a DVCS to survive
the read-only mode of RubyForge.

This is a change; but it’s one that we at Ruby Central feel is important.
We want to provide the community with what it needs. With services that
Github, the new SourceForge and Google Code provide we feel that source
management, mailing lists and bug tracking are being better provided by
others. We want to focus on community features. We will be developing
those quickly and that will all hub at RubyGems.org.

But now is not clear what is community features anymore, since GitHub
provides issue tracking, code hosting and collaboration and page
hosting, Google G. provides mailing lists and rdoc.info can
provide up to date documentation.

What would be the community features be created then?

Please don’t take my comment as wrong, but as maintainer of
RubyInstaller and developer of other projects I’m concern that the
segmentation will hurt more than help.

Right now is hard to get contributors and people find the
documentation, downloads and tools, with the switch of RubyForge will
make things even harder.

Regards,

3

On Oct 26, 7:27 pm, Richard K. [email protected] wrote:

services that Github, the new SourceForge and Google Code provide we
feel that source management, mailing lists and bug tracking are being
better provided by others. We want to focus on community features.
We will be developing those quickly and that will all hub at RubyGems.org

I’m glad to hear you guys are being proactive about new community
dynamics.

I want to thank you and Tom for your hard work and dedication to
RubyForge. You guys rock.

~Trans

4

As part of this transition, RubyForge is going to be slowly stood
down. It won’t simply be turned off, of course; we could see it
staying in read-only mode for quite a while. But that’s where things
are headed. The community hub functions of RubyForge will not go
away. Community features that RubyForge uniquely provides (or should
provide) will be added to the source base of the app that GemCutter
started with and will be maintained on github.

My $0.02–rubyforge was good but could easily go away. That being said,
I do find it useful for file distributing [i.e. I typically know where to go to download non gems, like rubygems-1.3.5.tgz], and several people
still use it for publishing documentation (their own style, their own
way, not mass produced like allgems.ruby-forum.com or rdoc.info). I
therefore would move it not be abandoned entirely yet, which is
apparently already in your plans :slight_smile:
Thanks for the good work there and keep it up.
-r

5

On Nov 5, 2009, at 10:48 AM, Roger P. wrote:

I do find it useful for file distributing [i.e. I typically know where to go to download non gems, like rubygems-1.3.5.tgz], and several
people
still use it for publishing documentation (their own style, their own
way, not mass produced like allgems.ruby-forum.com or rdoc.info). I
therefore would move it not be abandoned entirely yet, which is
apparently already in your plans :slight_smile:
Thanks for the good work there and keep it up.

Yeah, I think back in 2003 it was worthwhile for Ruby Central to
sponsor a code-hosting site. At this point the marginal value is
pretty low. But we’ll keep some services around, and hopefully in a
more useful form.

Yours,

Tom