So, I think this may be good news for some folks.
February 24, 2009 is the date that Jamis B. marked as the end of
several of his open source projects, including SQLite3/Ruby.[1]
Previously, he asked for help[2], updating SQLite3/Ruby to make it
work on Windows.
That sad news left a lot of us with a bad taste, and very unhappy, not
because we no longer will have someone to complain at, but because he
no longer enjoyed working on those projects.
Over the past months I’ve been improving rake-compiler [3] to be able
to catch most of the building issues of several projects[4], including
my own (I love to scratch my own itch).
The past days I wrote a post on my blog about “Getting Started with
Rails and SQLite3” [5], showing there how to successfully use
SQLite3/Ruby on Windows.
The next question was, what to do? The work to get all those lovely
gems was there, initial 1.9 was there, but was not official
While SQLite3/Ruby being the de-facto for getting started with Rails,
we couldn’t let it die.
Enough words, sent some emails to Jamis and now I can publish those
gems to RubyForge.
But what all that babbling means?
This means:
- My fork at GitHub [6] is the new mainstream for the releases
- I’m going to go over the open bugs and tickets and asses validity
and relevancy based on work that was already done in my fork. - The release cycle has been improved and almost automated. It can be
performed from Windows, Linux or OSX, even using latter to create
Windows native gems.
Now, what happens with new features:
- Pull requests with patches and bug fixes are going to be accepted.
- New features will be evaluated as long they don’t impose structural
changes and carry with them tests cases. - Patches that improve Ruby 1.9 compatibility are highly appreciated.
I don’t have strong knowledge of all the internals of this tool, so
don’t expect earth breaking changes from me, except ensuring
stability.
I hope this is good news to everybody. Now I’m going to stalk MySQL
binding author and get permission to push those lovely gems 
Cheers everybody!
[1]
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2009/2/25/net-ssh-capistrano-and-saying-goodbye
[2] http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/12/7/sqlite3-ruby-windows-builds
[3] GitHub - rake-compiler/rake-compiler: Provide a standard and simplified way to build and package Ruby C and Java extensions using Rake as glue.
[4]
http://wiki.github.com/luislavena/rake-compiler/projects-using-rake-compiler
[5]
http://blog.mmediasys.com/2009/07/06/getting-started-with-rails-and-sqlite3/
[6] GitHub - sparklemotion/sqlite3-ruby: Ruby bindings for the SQLite3 embedded database