Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

[Alexander Kellett]

The Rolling on Rails article that was posted on O'reilly was great,
it's addicted and inspired me to move to ruby as my main development
language.
I don't think anyone whom would like to try it out wouldn't be able to
get it running from that tutorial, but an all-in-one installer would
be pretty great.

how difficult would it be to make a single .zip file
containing all the required components and a .bat that
executed anything that was manually required? basically
i'd love to see an .exe which when installed opened an
ie with a running webrick and the source code directory
with a tiny gui for the few tools that rails has

Alex

 

[William James]

Go to this Perl forum: http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=219
When people ask for solutions, provide Ruby ones.

 

[gabriele renzi]

Alexander Kellett ha scritto:

it takes one windows user to do some work.
and the rest can profit.
i don't really understand why noone has just created an all in one .exe.
but i love my mac and my webrick install.
so i don't care

curt hibbs and (IIRC) kent sibilev are working on this.
Curt said athe he'd like to have suggestiions about it, and I bet he'd
appreciate help

 

[David A. Black]

Now my problem might be an APACHE problem. It might be a rails problem.
It might still be a MySQL problem. It might be a ruby problem.

It is a problem that stops me using rails.

Until new users do not routinely have such problems, you will not gain
more users.

Apparently the word hasn't gotten out. We're gaining new users every
day.

I have posted details of my problem elsewhere. If you want to help
please answer there.

"Malformed URL 'elsewhere'"

Here, I suggest you address the real issue. Ruby is a fantastic
language, let down by
poor online documentation
some bugs
lack of cohesion in what is presented.
No documetation of configuration, so when it does not work,
there is nothing to do but dig into the source!

Credit where is is due - If it wasn't for Thomas, Hunt and Why ruby
would be a dead duck.

How do you recruit 300 more like them?

You have named three intensely, intensively active Rubyists, including
the two who were directly responsible for Ruby decisively crossing
over into the non-Japanese world. Good choice for giving credit -- I
have no problem with that. At the same time, however, you have
phrased your salute to them in such a way as to deal a real insult to
a lot of people who have done a huge amount for Ruby, starting with
Matz and including many others. You don't have to do this in order to
give Dave, Andy, and Why the credit they deserve for their work. Look
around a bit and see what's going on. If you're really a fan of
people who devote lots of effort and inspire interest and enthusiasm,
you'll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

If you want Ruby to succeed Ruby and its killer application (Which
appears to be rails) must be "plug and play", for 99.9% of users. That
takes care, effort and diligence.

Please don't just stand there and crack the whip. I can promise you
that it is not going to turn out that you will have been the one to
introduce these ideas to the Ruby world. We haven't just been sitting
around with our mouths open staring at the wall waiting for someone to
tell us we need to make an effort. If you want to join the efforts,
please do. But please don't preach at this level. (Unless you're
trolling, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.)

p.s Did I mention I was still getting 500 errors from apache whenever I
used rails.

In the words of Mrs. Emma Peel, "Frequently." Are you on
#rubyonrails?


David

 

[Curt Hibbs]

it takes one windows user to do some work.
and the rest can profit.
i don't really understand why noone has just created an all in one .exe.
but i love my mac and my webrick install.
so i don't care

I'm working on it.

We already have the One-Click Ruby Installer for windows client side
development. I am working on a One-Click Ruby Server for windows that will
include ruby, apache, mysql and rails (possibly some more packages).
However, its still a few months off from a first release.

Curt

 

[James Britt]

Apparently the word hasn't gotten out. We're gaining new users every
day.

One indicator of the growth in Ruby's user base is the rise in the
number of posters who seem assured of their uncanny insight into Ruby's
real problems, while demonstrating a stunning ignorance of Ruby's
history and community.

Newcomers to any group may have a point of view that lets them see
things that have perhaps become invisible to old-timers, but more often
the issue is not whether something has ever been considered, but whether
that something has a reasonable path of action.

I don't want to ever discourage anyone from offering ideas and
suggestions, but I'd caution against phrases such as, "If you only do
...", "You just have to ... ", and, "Until [...] happens, then you'll
never [...] ."

Things are rarely that simple.


James

 

[Douglas Livingstone]

One indicator of the growth in Ruby's user base is the rise in the

number of posters who seem assured of their uncanny insight into Ruby's
real problems, while demonstrating a stunning ignorance of Ruby's
history and community.

That would be me

Perhaps it is a reflection of problems new users have, rather than
Ruby's problems.

I've not been around long enough to know Ruby or the Ruby community
very well. There seems to be lots of politics going around which I
don't understand. A bit like PHP5's weak support for Apache2, when it
was the combination of PHP4+Apache1 that made both products as popular
as they are.

Douglas

 

[James Britt]

That would be me

Perhaps it is a reflection of problems new users have, rather than
Ruby's problems.

But to be fair, if new users are having a problem, then it's Ruby's
problem too.

I've not been around long enough to know Ruby or the Ruby community
very well. There seems to be lots of politics going around which I
don't understand.

Interesting; I just don't see it. But maybe I've been blinded.

James

 

[Shashank Date]

Hi,

Interesting; I just don't see it. But maybe I've been blinded.

I can relate to Douglas's feeling. Right after I joined this mailing
list about three years ago, I found myself in the middle of a heated
discussion about the German translation of PickAxe and some issues
related to copyrights (or something to that effect). And I said to
myself, "Man, there is some mud-slinging going on here. No different
than groups. Let us just lurk for a while and figure out the political
terrain ... or better still just quit". Thankfully, that feeling went
out of the window very soon (due to some kind and thoughtful suggestions
by Hal Fulton) and I decided to hang on for a while. Never regretted
that decision to this day.

Of course, there is some politics going on here: long timers get tired
of explaining the same thing over and over again and some of them may
get all riled up if a new comer suggests and keeps defending her/his
point of view. Pretty soon, inflamatory verbage starts flowing out and
flame wars errupt. That, I feel, is a part of the growing pain. All I
can hope for is that people stay civil and calm while responding (easier
said than done) and ignore, yes completely ignore, the occasional trolls
that go tromping by. Not even say "this is troll" kind of ignore.

Having said so much, I must admit that this one of the nicest
communities I have been a part of, where the movers and shakers of the
language very patiently help dummies like me get their bearing.

Keep it up guys. And enjoy programming, use Ruby

-- shanko

 

[Ian Hobson]

Hi David,

No insult was intended to anyone, and I was not trolling. Apologies if I
came over that way. Please put it down to frustration. I am NOT skilled
in ruby yet, and finding the problem has proved very trying.

Please don't just stand there and crack the whip. I can promise you
that it is not going to turn out that you will have been the one to
introduce these ideas to the Ruby world. We haven't just been sitting
around with our mouths open staring at the wall waiting for someone to
tell us we need to make an effort. If you want to join the efforts,
please do. But please don't preach at this level. (Unless you're
trolling, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.)

The problem was that I did not have a d:/tmp directory. (The
installation script had not created it).

Looking deeper, the problem appears to be to do with the establishing a
temp directory in CGI context. ENV is tainted (I don't understand why?
ENV comes from the set up not the web).

In tmpdir.rb. the code is looking in places for the temp directory, that
do not apply to Win 2K. (IIRC they apply to win95/98), and thus leaving
@@systmpdir = '/tmp'. Then, because $SAFE is at 1, the Dir::tmpdir
method returned this wrong value.

Then the wrong value is stomped on by module BugFix, in
tempfile_bugfixed.rb line 28. (In
ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rubyzip-0.5.5\zip) because the result was
tainted.

I corrected this, and yet it still uses /tmp. I have not found where
this is stomped on.

I altered the defaults in cgi_process.rg line 40 where it sets the
default options. This did not help. The "fix" I have not found makes
options invalid.

I also get an error
D:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rubyzip-0.5.5/./zip/zip.rb:11: warning:
already initialized constant Tempfile. I don't know why, but I suspect
it is relevant.

So it appears we have a bug in code that is coding round a bug, in code
coding round a bug, that was triggered by an omission in an install
script!

As another contributor has remarked, problems for new uses are problems
for Ruby.

I also found that Webrick sets its tempdir (I think correctly) with the
line

:TempDir => ENV['TMPDIR']||ENV['TMP']||ENV['TEMP']||'/tmp',

Can code using Apache do something similar? I do not know Ruby well
enough yet to fix this (other than by creating the directory, which I
have done). Neither do I have the kit to test a patch on.

Regards

Ian

 

[Alexander Kellett]

Hi David,

No insult was intended to anyone, and I was not trolling. Apologies if
I came over that way. Please put it down to frustration. I am NOT
skilled in ruby yet, and finding the problem has proved very trying.

couldn't you just use webrick?

Alex

 

[Hal Fulton]

Interesting; I just don't see it. But maybe I've been blinded.

I think it's just a case of "the larger the population, the more
variance in individuals." There are always going to be a few
personality quirks in a few people; and the more we grow, the more
of it we'll see.

Remember that when Swift published _A Modest Proposal_ -- probably
the most blatant example of irony in the English language -- there
were people who took it as a serious proposition.


Hal

 

[Zach Dennis]

I also found that Webrick sets its tempdir (I think correctly) with the
line

:TempDir => ENV['TMPDIR']||ENV['TMP']||ENV['TEMP']||'/tmp',

Can code using Apache do something similar?

Set the environment variable for TMPDIR, TMP or TEMP, for your Ruby
script to use? If so yes, use the SetEnv and PassEnv directives.

for apache 1.x.x

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_env.html#setenv
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_env.html#passenv

for apache 2.x.x (I dont' think the usage has changed since version 1.x.x)

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_env.html#setenv
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_env.html#passenv

Zach