Ruby 1.8.7

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Hi Guys,

First, I wanted to say how much I appreciate all the effort going in to 
improving the state of Ruby in Fedora, working on Ruby 1.8.7 for Fedora 14 for 
now.

Since this is a collaborative effort, I'm sort of amazed that I had nothing to 
do with it. You guys have made it all happen! Don't get me wrong, I mean that 
to be a positive thing ;-)

Even though I'm considered the "owner" of Ruby in Fedora (note the quotes), I 
would like to think that such status should not mean that such one individual 
should be looked at as if the entire package and its future depended on the 
word or involvement of that one contributor.

So, again, I very much appreciate the involvement and effort you have all 
shown and put in towards including Ruby 1.8.7 in Fedora.

Now, I think we all know that I'm working on something different. My target is 
to make Fedora the ultimate platform for Ruby developers, and Enterprise Linux 
the ultimate platform to deploy Ruby applications. This includes, in my 
current plans, parallel stacks. There's insurmountable problems to overcome in 
the path towards such functionality. In short; it's going to take a while for 
me to get there.

That said; it shouldn't mean the status of Ruby in Fedora (meanwhile) comes to 
a stand-still. Again, I very much appreciate there's a number of people 
willing to take care for Ruby in Fedora now and for the foreseeable future.

Now, I was asked to look over the Ruby 1.8.7 feature, and the status of the 
current, latest package[1]. I regret to have to admit I do not have enough 
time to do so. I also regret that it's mutually exclusive with what I'm 
working on myself, and to just go ahead and destroy my box just to test the 
ruby 1.8.7 package, frankly, seems just too inefficient. Hence, I would like 
you all to continue the good work as you see fit. I have strong confidence in 
that Ruby 1.8.7 will be a success, despite even the slight probability of 
breaking some of the packages that depend on Ruby.

Furthermore, I would like you to consider the fact that little of all of this 
has been worked on through some or the other infrastructure that let's us 
truly collaborate. I regret the fact that the Fedora Project simply won't 
allow us to use their infrastructure to throw up one or more development 
repositories to work on various stuff, and so I'm setting up such 
infrastructure myself. If you're interested in working with me, please let me 
know ;-)

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

[1] http://mo.morsi.org/files/rpms/ruby-1.8.7.299-3.fc13.src.rpm