help (ruby-talk ML) 
Author Message
 help (ruby-talk ML)

Quote:
><... bits about i18n and text processing snipped ...>
>I will take your word for it that these are
>significant roadblocks for
>you and others. I typically deal with English (ASCII)
>text exclusively
>and so it hasn't been an issue for me -- yet.

I accept that Ruby's linguistic limitations are not a
problem for a majority of users.  But then, people who
might get text from any old country can't *be*
users...

Quote:
>Just curious, what would be the significance

(benefit) of having an
Quote:
>ActiveState Windows distribution versus some other

Windows distribution?

There is no particular magic virtue in the name
'ActiveState', but there were two things needed that
ActiveState could have provided:

Resources:  The boost ActiveState gave to Perl was
considerable -- a serious amount of resources were
added to the Perl project, leaving Perl's core people
free to work on the language secure in the knowledge
that the Windows hordes would be able to use it all
right out of the box.  The Pragmatic Programmers have
done a great job, but they have nothing like the
resources to spend on this that ActiveState gave to
Perl.  

Enough clout to make their distro the standard:  Most
people search for 'ruby windows binary' and come up
with all sorts of horrible things.  The PragProg
distro *may* be the best Windows distro, (though
ActiveScriptRuby is important), but it is only one of
*four* links to win32 Ruby distros on the
ruby-lang.org download page.  It feels futile to try
and add windows-specific functions when there are so
many competing distros many of which will never
incorporate any new functionality.  With ActiveState
Perl, though, it was possible to add lots of goodies,
because you could pretty well assume the users would
have them in their distro.

Quote:
>The most recent Ruby installer for Windows (from Andy
Hunt) included
>Ruby/DBI, DBD/ODBC, DBD/Postgres, DBD/MySQL and

DBD/Oracle.

So it does.  A thank you to Andy Hunt and a slap on
the wrist to myself.

Quote:
>But for things that do depend on
>modifications to the core it would be nice to have
>some more concrete
>plans to work with.

You accidentally pasted the words 'more concrete' into
your mail :)

You are right when you say that many of the features I
mentioned are not critical for the majority of users
(we'll never have threads and I can live with that).
However, the problem I hoped to draw attention to was
not the absence/desirability/necessity of particular
features, so much as the need, if Ruby is to grow and
spread any further, to move to a more open model of
software development.  

x



Mon, 13 Dec 2004 23:48:29 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)

Quote:

> Enough clout to make their distro the standard: Most people search
> for 'ruby windows binary' and come up with all sorts of horrible
> things.  The PragProg distro *may* be the best Windows distro,
> (though ActiveScriptRuby is important), but it is only one of *four*
> links to win32 Ruby distros on the ruby-lang.org download page.  It
> feels futile to try and add windows-specific functions when there
> are so many competing distros many of which will never incorporate
> any new functionality.  With ActiveState Perl, though, it was
> possible to add lots of goodies, because you could pretty well
> assume the users would have them in their distro.

Which raises a question.

How can we open up the process so that the community can get involved
in the generation of the windows distribution? If we moved it to
(say) SourceForge would other folks be interested in helping out?

Cheers

Dave



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:25:27 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)
Yes, I would gladly volunteer considerable effort to this end. I have
considerable Windows System level programming that I'd like to contribute
to, particularly, the multithreading issues noted elsewhere as a weakness in
the distribution.

-- Bob Calco

Quote:
-----Original Message-----

Thomas
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 12:22 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Cc: Andy Hunt
Subject: Re: help (ruby-talk ML)


> Enough clout to make their distro the standard: Most people search
> for 'ruby windows binary' and come up with all sorts of horrible
> things.  The PragProg distro *may* be the best Windows distro,
> (though ActiveScriptRuby is important), but it is only one of *four*
> links to win32 Ruby distros on the ruby-lang.org download page.  It
> feels futile to try and add windows-specific functions when there
> are so many competing distros many of which will never incorporate
> any new functionality.  With ActiveState Perl, though, it was
> possible to add lots of goodies, because you could pretty well
> assume the users would have them in their distro.

Which raises a question.

How can we open up the process so that the community can get involved
in the generation of the windows distribution? If we moved it to
(say) SourceForge would other folks be interested in helping out?

Cheers

Dave



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:51:37 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)

Quote:

> Yes, I would gladly volunteer considerable effort to this end. I
> have considerable Windows System level programming that I'd like to
> contribute to, particularly, the multithreading issues noted
> elsewhere as a weakness in the distribution.

That's great. In fact, changes to the basic Ruby interpreter and
runtime don't need a project on SF: all you have to do is check out
the source code from ruby-lang and set to it. I'm sure that Matz will
be happy to accept patches, and will likely make folks who produce
good work committers in the tree.

If you do do work n this area, I'd encourage you to update the rubicon
tests accordingly: Chad Fowler (among others) spent some time getting
the tests more stable under Windows, so we can now start using
them. If there's a feature that's broken that isn't in the tests,
write a test that fails, then fix the interpreter and watch the test
pass. If there are tests that are currently not run on Windows because
of compatibility problems, let's make them run.

I'd love to see a couple of Window's efforts get started in earnest:
one to beef up Windows support in the interpreter and its libraries,
and the other to have the community work towards building a standard
Windows distribution that we can all agree on. Pragmatic Programmers
may not have the resources of ActiveState, but as a community we have
considerably more. It just needs coordinating.

Cheers (and thanks)

Dave



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 01:02:06 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)


Quote:
> That's great. In fact, changes to the basic Ruby interpreter and
> runtime don't need a project on SF: all you have to do is check out
> the source code from ruby-lang and set to it. I'm sure that Matz will
> be happy to accept patches, and will likely make folks who produce
> good work committers in the tree.

At last year's RubyConf, in the sort-of "round-table" discussion at the end,
someone asked a question along the lines: if Matz himself isn't especially
interested in improving the Ruby core support for Windows, would he at least
allow interested members of the Ruby community to make improvements to the
core? The question was met with what was, at best, a "lukewarm" response,
which I took at the time to mean he really didn't want anyone soiling Ruby
with Windows-related code. But over the past year I've come to realize that
it was probably just Matz being quiet and mysterious ;)

I guess the question (which has come up before) is what really needs to be
"fixed" in the Ruby core for Windows. I'm all for new and improved extension
modules that make Ruby-on-Windows more powerful, but by definition those
don't require modifications to the core. The only problem that immediately
comes to mind is the "quirky" behavior of Ruby threads on Windows, and I'm
not sure that anyone's nailed that one down conclusively.

Quote:
> I'd love to see a couple of Windows efforts get started in earnest:
> one to beef up Windows support in the interpreter and its libraries,
> and the other to have the community work towards building a standard
> Windows distribution that we can all agree on. Pragmatic Programmers
> may not have the resources of ActiveState, but as a community we have
> considerably more. It just needs coordinating.

See previous question about what "beefing up" Windows support in the
interpreter and its libraries entails. Or maybe we both have the same
question ;) And I definitely agree about farming out more of the work on
building a Windows distribution. I for one will be glad to "adopt" some of
the popular extensions and make sure that Windows binaries are available.
Seems like we just need a central repository for such things.


Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:12:33 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)

Quote:

> I guess the question (which has come up before) is what really needs to be
> "fixed" in the Ruby core for Windows. I'm all for new and improved extension
> modules that make Ruby-on-Windows more powerful, but by definition those
> don't require modifications to the core. The only problem that immediately
> comes to mind is the "quirky" behavior of Ruby threads on Windows, and I'm
> not sure that anyone's nailed that one down conclusively.

Threading is the big one. Then there's also the strange subprocess
handling: last time I tried it, accessing $? after calling system()
threw an exception, for example. Handling of built-in commands also
used to be problematic.

I also see problems with the networking code: webrick keeps crashing
for me under windows.

In general, Ruby under Windows is not as stable or as reliable as
under Unix. If someone were to take charge, they could work on
building the bug list.

Quote:
> > I'd love to see a couple of Windows efforts get started in earnest:
> > one to beef up Windows support in the interpreter and its libraries,
> > and the other to have the community work towards building a standard
> > Windows distribution that we can all agree on. Pragmatic Programmers
> > may not have the resources of ActiveState, but as a community we have
> > considerably more. It just needs coordinating.

> See previous question about what "beefing up" Windows support in the
> interpreter and its libraries entails. Or maybe we both have the same
> question ;) And I definitely agree about farming out more of the work on
> building a Windows distribution. I for one will be glad to "adopt" some of
> the popular extensions and make sure that Windows binaries are available.
> Seems like we just need a central repository for such things.

Andy's building a metadata system which lets him build new releases
declaratively. He's currently plagued by incompatibilities between all
the different installation mechanisms and requirements that folks
use. If we could get the windows distribution train rolling, perhaps
we could also use it as a bully pulpit to bring some standardization
here too.

My ideal would be to have a community project to get Ruby support
under Windows as solid as Perl's. That means fixing stuff in the
interpreter and libraries (and, as importantly) showing a commitment
to fixing stuff in the Windows environment. Second, I'd like to see
the community come to consensus on a Windows distribution (possibly
via a SF project to set up the distribution builder). Once that's
there, it would be nice to have a system that could generate these
distributions (say daily), so we no longer had to wait for Andy to get
a spare evening to do it. Perhaps SF could do this for us too: I
haven't investigated their build system.

Cheers

Dave



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:20:34 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)

Quote:

> Threading is the big one. Then there's also the strange subprocess
> handling: last time I tried it, accessing $? after calling system()
> threw an exception, for example. Handling of built-in commands also
> used to be problematic.

I am going to try to figure out the threading problem, out of necessity --
as it is holding up the development of FreeRIDE.

If anyone has already spent any time investigating this, I would appreciate
any information that you could pass on to speed up my efforts.

Curt



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:31:01 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)

Quote:
> it would be nice to have a system that could generate these
> distributions (say daily), so we no longer had to wait for Andy to get
> a spare evening to do it.

I'd certainly be for anything like this and would be willing to contribute
(time is, as always, another matter :)

Chris



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:41:29 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)
Hi,

In message "Re: help (ruby-talk ML)"

|At last year's RubyConf, in the sort-of "round-table" discussion at the end,
|someone asked a question along the lines: if Matz himself isn't especially
|interested in improving the Ruby core support for Windows, would he at least
|allow interested members of the Ruby community to make improvements to the
|core? The question was met with what was, at best, a "lukewarm" response,
|which I took at the time to mean he really didn't want anyone soiling Ruby
|with Windows-related code. But over the past year I've come to realize that
|it was probably just Matz being quiet and mysterious ;)

Was I? ;-)

As you know, I myself is not interested in the Windows support, but
I've already allowed Windows improvement, and even assigned a few guys
for Windows support.  All we need are bug reports, proposals, ideas,
and especially patches.

                                                        matz.



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:52:12 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)
Hi

Is there an accepted way of handling timed interval events? I'd like to
process some code every 30 seconds.  I can't seem to find any timer or
interval classes in Ruby's library.

Thanks for any hints or code snippets.
S



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:10:26 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)


Quote:
> Hi

> Is there an accepted way of handling timed interval events? I'd like to
> process some code every 30 seconds.  I can't seem to find any timer or
> interval classes in Ruby's library.

I'll bet there's a better way, but what about creating a thread that sleeps
thirty seconds in between doing its thing?

    th = Thread.new do
      loop do
        puts "I just did something, going back to sleep now!"
        sleep(5)
      end
    end

HTH,

Lyle



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:33:15 GMT  
 help (ruby-talk ML)


Quote:
> Hi

> Is there an accepted way of handling timed interval events? I'd like to
> process some code every 30 seconds.  I can't seem to find any timer or
> interval classes in Ruby's library.

I'll bet there's a better way, but what about creating a thread that sleeps
thirty seconds in between doing its thing?

    th = Thread.new do
      loop do
        puts "I just did something, going back to sleep now!"
        sleep(30)
      end
    end

HTH,

Lyle



Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:33:26 GMT  
 
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