Gentoo Resources for Ruby

1. Project Description

The Ruby project maintains packages for Ruby implementations, libraries and development tools.

This project also maintains the RubyGems package, the de facto standard for packaging Ruby projects. Many Ruby packages currently in the Portage tree use this mechanism for installing.

Highlighted packages include Rake, Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, and RSpec, to name a few.

2. Developers

Developer	Nickname	Role
Hans de Graaff	graaff	Lead
Aggelos Orfanakos	agorf	Member
Joshua Nichols	nichoj	Member
Christian Marie	pingu	Member
Robin H. Johnson	robbat2	Member

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

3. Recruitment

We are currently looking for users interested in helping the project with the following jobs:

General package maintainer

Job description: General ruby package maintainer to help out managing packages in the herd. Revision bumping, bug filing/fixing, updating ebuilds per eclass or syntax changes, etc. This involves a mix of gem and source based ebuilds.
Requirements: Experience with ruby on Linux, ideally Gentoo. Knowledge of the gem repository system and its supporting software and experience with building ruby software using setup.rb and its many incarnations.
Contact: ruby@gentoo.org

Ruby core package maintainer

Job description: Ruby core package maintainer to help out with the core ruby packages (dev-lang/ruby and dev-ruby/rubygems). Revision bumping, handling security bugs, patching packages to play nice with Gentoo, following upstream to handle changes and updates in a timely manner.
Requirements: Experience with ruby on Linux, ideally Gentoo. Knowledge of C and ruby. Experience with patching software.
Contact: ruby@gentoo.org

4. Project tasks

The tasks of the Ruby project are:

Ruby 1.9 - Support for all Ruby packages with 1.9

Ruby 1.9 was released in December 2007, but Gentoo's Ruby infrastructure will need to be updated and tested before it can be properly supported.

Starting date:	12-29-2007

Milestone #	ETA	Description
1		Package Ruby 1.9
2		Support RubyGems being installed for multiple slots of Ruby

Build RubyGems - Generate and test from source

While packaging directly from gems is very convenient, it does have some draw backs, such as not being able to readily patch and not being able to run unit tests. Generating gems from source would address both these issues.