Yes, RailsForge! 5

Posted by sbecker Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:45:00 GMT

I’m part of a small team tossing around ideas for a RailsForge.

Surveying the community

Jason Perry chose to survey the community and get some discussion going before anything was built. That’s been interesting. We’ve already received a lot of feedback – tons of positive, some negative, and some generous offers of help.

Since there’s nothing to see yet, and 90% of stuff produced these days is crap, some people automatically assume you too will build crap and yell “NO!” Some of it is along the lines of “don’t duplicate RubyForge” or “don’t fragment the community.” And we’ve all pretty much agreed we don’t want to. We’re not going to host source code or gems on RailsForge. Although its still a question on the survey, because Jason still wants to know what you think.

The big idea

Think of RailsForge as a view of the ruby community that’s central to rails development, with the hope of making things easier to find, learn, and discuss. More like a Technorati for Rails projects, but not so much svn/trac/tickets. We’ll leave that to existing facilities like RubyForge. We want to keep that and build a community focused site on top of it. We’re still letting the ideas percolate for a few more days. Feel free to contribute.

We’ll then go quiet for a month or so and build something. ;)

RubyForge

What about RubyForge? It could use some love too! More on that in another post.

Comments

Leave a response

  1. Avatar
    Dr Nic Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:27:09 GMT

    Hmm. Disappointing that you’re building a rails-specific forge, versus an improved rubyforge.

    Rails is only one solution for one subset of problems. Most rails apps evolve to require help outside of Rails – mongrel handlers, daemons, admin scripts etc.

    Rails is the killer app for Ruby. But it is Ruby, and that’s the 2nd thing a newbie needs to learn.

    The 1st is how to run the rails command :)

  2. Avatar
    art Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:32:10 GMT

    I have to agree with Dr. Nic…

    RubyForge needs improvement and that should be the main aim. What about the other ruby based frameworks?

  3. Avatar
    Scott Becker Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:51:31 GMT

    Dr Nic & Art – I agree with you both, I want to improve RubyForge!

    I think RailsForge has a name problem. The aim, as I understand it from the others – is to create a community site – to make things easier to find, learn, and discuss. Calling it “forge” is confusing the issue. (There were questions on the survey about hosting projects and subversion, but that’s been dropped from the plan.)

  4. Avatar
    Daniel Berger Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:06:57 GMT

    If you’re going to go through with this I recommend taking a look at redMine. In fact, I’ve talked to Tom about completely replacing the GForge code base with redMine.

    It’s Ruby. It’s Rails. It has CVS, SVN and Mercurial support. It looks good. It’s functional. It is very configurable. It’s better than any other PM system I’ve seen out there, not just the Rails based ones.

    http://www.redmine.org/

  5. Avatar
    Spacemonkey Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:35:02 GMT

    How about making a rails application directory instead, and leaving RubyForge for development of rails apps? I can think of one project that set up a directory of extensions and it immediately became the most visible and valuable resource for that project – as all those newcomers finally had a place to browse for things they needed, and could also interact with the developers with reviews and ratings and such.

    By separating the developers from the consumers, you gain a lot more flexibility to tailor each resource specific to that audience.

    Just a thought.