Its almost Christmas time and that means presents.
It also means that sometime between today and December 25th you need to go out and buy other people some presents because you haven’t done it yet.
But there’s someone else special in your life that deserves an Xmas gift this year. That special someone is your open source projects.
You might think, “But, Dr Nic, what do I get for the open source project that already has everything? What gift would my open source projects possible appreciate?”
Its true – this year has been a boon for open source. You probably migrated your projects from SVN to Git this year. Specifically, you probably clicked the “create a new one” link on your GitHub home page a lot this year: either to migrate your old projects to github or start new ones. Lots of new ones.
And now that your code is on github, your README file is rendered beautifully on the home page, so you were more inclined to rename it to README.markdown or README.textile and thusforthly fill it full of education information about your projects.
More people would then instantaneously figure out what the f@#$ your project actually does, thus more people used it, thus more people wrote patches or forked your code and sent Pull Requests.
All round, in 2008, I bet your open source projects had a sweet year.
Nonetheless, it is Christmas time and you should now get them a present. Something they wouldn’t get for themselves. Something you wouldn’t have done for them except for the free loving spirit of Christmas.
The Gift for all Open Source projects
A website.
Oh sure, github renders your README.markdown file. Yeah, yeah, github gives you a wiki for your project. Sure, sure, Google Groups let you communicate with your co-developers and users. Certainly, you don’t need a website for your project.
That’s why its a Christmas gift. You’re going to do it because you care.
Websites sell your project. READMEs and Wikis educate. The project website will sell it and make people want to use your stuff.
A website could have a blog with an RSS/atom feed. Then you could post updates about your project. People could subscribe and also leave comments. Oh the novelty.
And if it only took 5 minutes to get all this setup – the website code, the blog engine, the RSS feed, the comments, and published to its own hosted server – then that would just be oh so sweet.
So we’re going to do some craft for our Xmas present. A little DIY project, if you will. You’ll need a few things that you’ll find around your house, a command-line interface, and a beer or perhaps some port or sherry. Christmas cake is good too.
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Bugger.
I’m a Ruby monogamist. I use the Ruby that comes with Leopard (ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]). Oh sure I’ve cheated on my Ruby a couple of times. It was just sex, I didn’t fall in love, I promise.
My machine has had various versions of jRuby, Rubinius and MacRuby installed at various times, but I don’t think it’s ever had two working copies of Ruby MRI (Matz Ruby Implementation) at a time.
Ok, that’s a lie. On Christmas Day 2007, Matz released Ruby 1.9. Yes I was a deviant. I installed it. But I didn’t inhale. ruby19 sat on my filesystem outside the $PATH. It was a trophy not a tool.
My Ruby monogamy was working out perfectly for me, whilst I collected futurist and novelty Ruby implementations as a passive hobby, until yesterday when I saw the above tweet.
That’s a bit of a bugger. I mean, why was he playing with Ruby 1.9.1 anyway?
Or perhaps having multiple version of Ruby on one computer isn’t some illicit activity. Everyone else is doing it, Your Honour.
I still didn’t care for having multiple ruby versions lying around in my path; but I had to fix rubigen. I just wanted a way to fix bugs against ruby 1.9+ and move on with my life. I didn’t want to have to do any manual work in order to set this up. Surely someone else has solved this problem already?
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The Open Source Developers Conference (osdc) is a nifty conference – people from different language communities, who all do open source, come together in harmony. They simultaneously snigger at each other and then proceed to steal each others ideas when they aren’t looking.
Miscellaneous idea possibly worth stealing from Perl: when you install Perl modules from CPAN it runs the module’s tests locally to confirm everything is oaky-dokey. You can manually do this via gem install --test rails, but its not the default. Nor have I ever used the --test flag. I just looked it up via gem help install. I like it.
Another CPAN thing to steal: For any RubyGem or perhaps Rails project on rubyforge/github/whatever, show the aggregate status of tests. Here’s a sample from CPAN. Lots of green lines but the aggregate change of this project working? 11%. I like the chart, and perhaps runcoderun or some other hosted CI service to generate a sexy graph of test outputs for dependencies.
Anyway, Ruby. I did a talk. I have slides.
Over time I’ve written a few RubyGems and am pretty happy with my basic tools and workflow for getting new gems out the door or maintaining existing projects. I use newgem + a patched version of hoe, I use git + github, and recently I started using runcoderun for hosted continuous integration.
If you’re new to creating your own RubyGems, perhaps my workflow and tools are a useful starting point to follow.
If you want an account with runcoderun, and I reckon you do, then hassle Rob Sanheim (twitter). For what its worth, tell him I said it was urgent.
There is now a sexy blog badge to show off the current pass/fail state of each of your projects, by Glenn Vanderburg. Badges are fun. It seems to clash with having github-badge in the same page, and there are other bugs with these badges. Probably my fault. I should investigate that soon.