I have finally reached a decision regarding my involvement in the Debian Ruby packaging efforts. I have decided to stop. This has been a very hard decision to make. I have invested huge amounts of time in that work over the years. I still love the language, and will continue to use it on a daily basis for my own developments. I still hope that it will succeed. I know that some people will be disappointed by that decision (and that others will think “your work was useless anyway, people should use RVM and rubygems”).

But I also know that I won’t be able to push for all the required changes alone. I just don’t have the time, nor the motivation. For the record, here are the changes I would have liked to see in the Ruby community.

The core Ruby development community should mature.

The core Ruby development community is still dominated by Japanese developers. While not a bad thing in itself, it is easily explained by the fact that the main development mailing list, where most of the important decisions are taken, is in japanese. ruby-dev@ should be closed, and all the technical discussions should happen on the english-speaking ruby-core@ list instead.

The release management process should also improve. Currently, it looks like a total mess. The following Ruby development branches are actively maintained:

ruby_1_8 (106 commits over the last six months)

ruby_1_8_6 (4 commits over the last six months)

ruby_1_8_7 (35 commits over the last six months)

ruby_1_9_1 (4 commits over the last six months)

ruby_1_9_2 (227 commits over the last six months)

trunk (1543 commits over the last six months)

While the state of the ruby_1_8_6 and ruby_1_9_1 branches is clear (very important bugfixes only), the state of all of the other branches is rather unclear.

What’s the stable Ruby branch? 1.8 or 1.9? If it’s 1.9, why are people still actively developing in the ruby_1_8 branch? How long will they continue to be maintained in parallel, dividing the manpower? Is a Ruby 1.8.8 release to be expected? Will it be ABI/API compatible with 1.8.7? Is the ruby_1_8_7 branch really bugfixes-only? How much testing of it has been done? If it’s bugfixes-only and regression-free, I should push it to Debian squeeze, due to be released in a few weeks. But would you recommend that? Due to past breakages in the ruby_1_8_7 branch, it’s unlikely that we will do it.

Is the ruby_1_9_2 a regression-free, bugfix-only branch? If yes, isn’t 227 commits over 6 months a lot? What will be the version of the next release of “trunk”? When is it expected? Will it be ABI-compatible with the current ruby_1_9_2 branch? API-compatible?

New releases in the 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 branches were done on december 25th. Why were they no betas or RCs allowing wider testing? How much testing has been done behind the scenes?

Most of those questions have no clear answer. The Ruby development community should build a common understanding of the status of the various branches, and of their release expectations. Releasing on december 25th of each year sounds fun, but is releasing when everybody is on vacation really a good idea?

It would be fantastic to have something similar to Python Enhancement Proposals in the Ruby community. But having open discussions in english about the major issues would already be great.

Ruby is not just the interpreter.

The Ruby development community should clearly define what the Ruby platform is. There are some big players, like Rails, and newer interpreter releases should not be done before ensuring that those big players still work.

Also, since we have alternative Ruby interpreters, like JRuby, Rubinius and MacRuby, we need a clear process on how they integrate with the rest of the ecosystem. For example, having each of them rely on their own outdated fork of the whole stdlib is ridiculous, since it’s not where they compete.

The Ruby community should acknowledge that RVM and Rubygems are not for everybody. People who say so should be laughed at. Of course, RVM and Rubygems are nice tools for some people. But it is completely wrong to believe that compiling from source using RVM should be the standard way of installing Ruby, or that all people interested in installing Redmine should know that Ruby has its own specific packaging system. The Ruby community should work with their target platforms to improve how Ruby is distributed instead of reinventing the wheel. That includes Debian, but also RedHat-based distros, for example. It is likely that it won’t be possible to reach a one-size-fits-all situation. But that’s real life.

Some people in the Ruby community should stop behaving like assholes. As one of the Debian Ruby maintainers, I have been routinely accused of creating crippled packages on purpose (FTR, I don’t think that the Debian packages are crippled, despite what the rumors says). Debian is not the only target of that. Just yesterday, someone called for abandonning YARV (the new Ruby VM in Ruby 1.9), calling it Yet Another Random Vailure. This kind of comments is really hurting the people who are investing their free time in Ruby, and is turning away people who consider getting involved. In Debian, we have had a lot of problems getting people to help with Ruby maintenance since they are getting shit from the community all the time.

So, what’s the future for Ruby in Debian?

For the interpreter, the two other maintainers, Akira Yamada and Daigo Moriwaki, are of course free to continue their work, and I wish them good luck.

For the pkg-ruby-extras team, which maintains most of the Ruby libraries and applications, the future is less clear. The team was already badly understaffed, and I feel that I should probably clean up its status by orphaning/removing the packages that are unmaintained otherwise. This won’t affect all the packages that the team maintains: some packages (like redmine) are actively maintained, and will stay.

For me, it just means I will have more time for other things (possibly not Free Software-related). If things improve dramatically, I might also come back to Ruby packaging at some point.

Update: there’s also a number of interesting comments about this post on this site.

Update 2: First, thanks a lot for all the interesting comments. I will make some follow-up posts trying to summarize what was said. It seems that this post also triggered some reactions on ruby-core@, with Charles Olivier explaining the JRuby stdlib fork, and Yui Naruse clarifying that all questions are welcomed on ruby-core@. This is great, really.