Current total/status of the plan?

[Nick B.]

Hi Gregory,

What's the current status? Could you put up a progress bar or
something?

Also, how do we suggest what to work on when we donate?

Best,

Nick

[Gregory Brown]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:20 AM, Nick B. <nik...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Gregory,
>
> What's the current status? Could you put up a progress bar or
> something?

I'm currently still just accepting donations. The pledgie drive will
close by April 1st, a primary project will be decided by April10th,
work will start by April 15th.

> Also, how do we suggest what to work on when we donate?

Unless we get some groundshaking ideas like... right now, the projects
have been limited to the following three ideas:

== Ruby 1.9 Field Medic.

Start with Ruport and tumble through dependencies, working on
compatibility issues. From there, work on helping with 1.9 support
where needed in projects like: ActiveRecord, mechanize, redcloth,
Camping, Merb, hpricot, highline, and maybe others. I've not checked
the 1.9 status of these projects, but I'm sure could come up with many
more if time permitted.

== Uncovering Hidden Gems

I could request suggestions for various useful but under-documented or
less well known Ruby libraries, either third party or stdlib, and
write a large series of tutorials and quick references. The idea here
is that it would hopefully result in a large amount of documentation
being written, which would spark contributions to these many 'hidden
gems' in Ruby.

== First class PDF support in Ruby.

I'm currently maintaining PDF::Writer along with Mike Milner. The
library implements most of the PDF spec, and is incredibly useful.
However, it's not very usable. It is slow, has API issues, and
countless bugs. The current plan is to maintain the library making
minor improvements when we can. A large time block would allow for
something better: A fast, thin, pretty rewrite. This would go a long
way to helping Ruby be a first choice for reporting software
development.

I will flesh these out in more detail tomorrow, and then encourage
people to help me select a project by consensus. If a consensus
cannot be reached, we'll do some sort of voting. Based on the
negative feedback I've been receiving about donation-proportional
voting, I think we will avoid it, relying instead of community
feedback open to all Rubyists, whether or not they were able to
donate.

-greg