The future of Ruport
Gregory Brown
I know Ruport has been somewhat dormant lately. I haven't quite
decided what the fate of it will be, but I want to give people a sense
of what's in my mind for now.
* I've created a new tracker at: http://ruport.lighthouseapp.com .
This will be the new official place to report bugs and requests for
both acts_as_reportable and ruport-core.
* AAR is now maintained by Andrew France. I need to make sure he has
access to RubyForge, but other than that, it's totally up to him what
happens with AAR. I am a user of that library, occasionally, but
have never meaningfully worked on its code, so I cannot maintain it.
However, it should be considered part of the Ruport project, ideally.
* Ruport 1.6.x will continue to be maintained as far as bug fixes and
other minor issues go. However, please note that aside from pushing
a release when new things come up on Github, I don't expect to move
the 1.6.x codebase forward. There will be no 1.7 release.
* I will continue some experiments for a Prawn+Fatty based Ruport 2,
including my ideas for how to fix various high level design issues at:
http://github.com/sandal/ruport. However, this should not be
considered official, has no timeline, and may never be released. The
purpose of this is to provide ideas for someone who may wish to bring
Ruport forward in the future, not to provide a usable, stable product.
This may all change if my work depends on Ruport in the future, but
there are no promises here.
* ruport-util is no longer supported, at all. I would like to see
some of these things broken out into extensions, similar to the way
prawn-layout and prawn-format work for Prawn. If we can find
maintainers and think about suitable ways to organize this code, we
can do this. Until then, consider all of that code abandoned.
So when it boils down to it, what I am saying is I don't use Ruport
nearly as much as I used to, and that my time is severely limited. I
really want to focus my energies on bringing Prawn to a 1.0 release,
and I consider that my main commitment to the community at this point.
I cannot effectively maintain AAR because it is not a familiar
codebase to me, and I can't maintain ruport-util because it was never
really cleaned up to the point where it was stable. However, Ruport
1.6 has proven to be a solid framework which I will help make sure
stays serviceable moving forward.
So in short, it's not that I'm exactly abandoning Ruport, but that I
don't have any concrete plans for it. Therefore, those interested in
working on it or using it will need to help carry the load. I'll be
happy to help however I can, of course. Look for a more official
announcement eventually, but hopefully this will serve as a good
enough update as to where things stand.
-greg
--
BOOK: http://rubybestpractices.com
TECH: http://blog.majesticseacreature.com
NON-TECH: http://metametta.blogspot.com
Andrew France
Thanks Greg.
> * AAR is now maintained by Andrew France. I need to make sure he has
> access to RubyForge, but other than that, it's totally up to him what
> happens with AAR.
>
There are a couple of minor issues, I'm not aware of any feature
requests and don't currently have any major plans beyond maintenance
against Rails releases. I'd like to release a new gem to fix some old
bugs but need a few people to test that it doesn't break their existing
code. The latest code is at the GitHub account, but hasn't generated a
gem for some reason, Greg can you check the 'RubyGem' box is ticked please?
http://github.com/ruport/acts_as_reportable/tree/master
I guess it would also be useful if you could please add me to the AAR
Lighthouse account, although I do find that service really frustrating
to use.
> * I will continue some experiments for a Prawn+Fatty based Ruport 2,
> including my ideas for how to fix various high level design issues at:
> http://github.com/sandal/ruport.
I've just started a small reporting project and found it was quite easy
to use Prawn in a Ruport formatter.
I will have a look at ruport-util as I've never really paid attention to
it but there do appear to be some useful things in it worth saving. I'd
be interested to hear which aspects of ruport-util people use, can
anyone who uses it please speak up. :)
Lastly, the rubyreports.org web site is still excellent but it might be
an idea to update (or remove) the news section so people don't get the
impression that it might be a dead project with the most recent dated
entry being 2007.
Best regards,
Andrew
Gregory Brown
> There are a couple of minor issues, I'm not aware of any feature
> requests and don't currently have any major plans beyond maintenance
> against Rails releases. I'd like to release a new gem to fix some old
> bugs but need a few people to test that it doesn't break their existing
> code. The latest code is at the GitHub account, but hasn't generated a
> gem for some reason, Greg can you check the 'RubyGem' box is ticked please?
> http://github.com/ruport/acts_as_reportable/tree/master
Should be enabled now. We should get you set up on RubyForge though.
Github gems are a great way for people to pull code in a pinch, but
hardly a substitute for official distribution, until RubyGems is fixed
to reflect the modern world :)
> I guess it would also be useful if you could please add me to the AAR
> Lighthouse account, although I do find that service really frustrating
> to use.
I sent an invite. Can you elaborate on the problems you've had?
>> * I will continue some experiments for a Prawn+Fatty based Ruport 2,
>> including my ideas for how to fix various high level design issues at:
>> http://github.com/sandal/ruport.
>
> I've just started a small reporting project and found it was quite easy
> to use Prawn in a Ruport formatter.
Yeah, in fact, that's so easy that I'm not sure what I can do to
improve it much. Though Fatty is IMO a much better abstract
formatting engine than Ruport's, it is still pretty easy to build
formatters in Ruport 1.6
> I will have a look at ruport-util as I've never really paid attention to
> it but there do appear to be some useful things in it worth saving. I'd
> be interested to hear which aspects of ruport-util people use, can
> anyone who uses it please speak up. :)
Yes, actually, some of that code is quite good. It just needs to
live somewhere outside of the 'backyard toolshed' that it's currently
in.
Interesting bits should be grouped and released as their own packages,
or merged upstream.
> Lastly, the rubyreports.org web site is still excellent but it might be
> an idea to update (or remove) the news section so people don't get the
> impression that it might be a dead project with the most recent dated
> entry being 2007.
I'll throw the sources up on github. Maybe we should host it via a
github page actually, since that'd allow it to be more easily
maintained by someone other than me. What do you think?
Andrew France
>> The latest code is at the GitHub account, but hasn't generated a
>> gem for some reason, Greg can you check the 'RubyGem' box is ticked please?
>> http://github.com/ruport/acts_as_reportable/tree/master
>>
>
> Should be enabled now. We should get you set up on RubyForge though.
> Github gems are a great way for people to pull code in a pinch, but
> hardly a substitute for official distribution, until RubyGems is fixed
> to reflect the modern world :)
>
Thanks! I'm hoping the GitHub gem just makes it easier for people to
test the changes/fixes before it becomes official.
>> I guess it would also be useful if you could please add me to the AAR
>> Lighthouse account, although I do find that service really frustrating
>> to use.
>>
>
> I sent an invite. Can you elaborate on the problems you've had?
>
Oh it might just be me, but I seem to have tremendous difficulty using
and navigating Lighthouse, as it just seems to lack the most basic
functionality like sorting columns, search filtering that doesn't
require me to memorise keywords, categories, ability to 'watch' projects
a la GitHub, or similar things that every other tracker I've used has
(Redmine, Mantis, Bugzilla!). Plus the interface hides way too much
information, esp behind drop-down menus. It seems a little bit broken,
e.g. "Your Projects" profile section does nothing and I haven't received
the invite you've sent!
I dunno if anyone agrees as it seems quite popular and I don't know any
other free hosted issue trackers anyway so I accede. :)
>> Lastly, the rubyreports.org web site is still excellent but it might be
>> an idea to update (or remove) the news section so people don't get the
>> impression that it might be a dead project with the most recent dated
>> entry being 2007.
>>
>
> I'll throw the sources up on github. Maybe we should host it via a
> github page actually, since that'd allow it to be more easily
> maintained by someone other than me. What do you think?
>
If it's all just static HTML then the GitHub Page feature via CNAME to
rubyreports.org would seem to be a good plan. Eventually it'll probably
be nice to add some documentation to the Ruport GitHub wiki and link to
that from the site.
All the best,
Andrew
Gregory Brown
sent an invite. Can you elaborate on the problems you've had?
> Oh it might just be me, but I seem to have tremendous difficulty using
> and navigating Lighthouse, as it just seems to lack the most basic
> functionality like sorting columns, search filtering that doesn't
> require me to memorise keywords, categories, ability to 'watch' projects
> a la GitHub, or similar things that every other tracker I've used has
> (Redmine, Mantis, Bugzilla!). Plus the interface hides way too much
> information, esp behind drop-down menus. It seems a little bit broken,
> e.g. "Your Projects" profile section does nothing and I haven't received
> the invite you've sent!
What do you think about switching over to github issues?
http://github.com/blog/411-github-issue-tracker
If you like this idea, I can make the switch.
-greg
Andrew France
> What do you think about switching over to github issues?
> http://github.com/blog/411-github-issue-tracker
>
> If you like this idea, I can make the switch.
>
Oops some people will get this twice as I replied to the post on the
Prawn list, but yes I wholeheartedly endorse it :). I understand there
isn't a migration path yet so let me know if you want any help migrating
tickets from wherever else they may be.
Andrew
Gregory Brown
As far as Ruport goes I don't want to migrate tickets. Start fresh,
avoid copying stale issues over.
So yeah, let's move to github. I'll announce that over the weekend
and put a note on the lighthouse tracker for people to use it,
instead.
-greg