Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I recently had an e-mail from a Windows developer in the Ruby community who pointed out how opaque many Ruby projects are regarding Windows. He works on porting a number of libraries - so he's definitely putting in some hard work - but has had issues with project owners not updating CHANGELOGs properly, deliberately breaking Windows support, etc.

At Euruko (European Ruby conference) earlier this year, I raised the topic of Windows and.. most of the audience couldn't care less. They were mostly of the opinion that if Windows people wanted to use Ruby, they had to do the legwork. (FWIW, I'm an OS X user who doesn't care too much for Windows either, but I recognize there's a massive userbase there)

Windows is in the third-world of operating systems when it comes to Ruby - so Jamis' standpoint is less than surprising.

View on HN

"I recently had an e-mail from a Windows developer in the Ruby community who pointed out how opaque many Ruby projects are regarding Windows."

I guess my response to that would be that Microsoft is quite opaque regarding Ruby. By being such a closed system, Windows doesn't do anything to help developers improve Ruby library compatibility.

Compare this to Apple. Apple builds Ruby into its operating system, contributes patches upstream, and is even supporting the development of MacRuby, which more tightly integrates Ruby into the Mac OS X operating system.

So the opaqueness goes both ways in my opinion.

Due to this, I am very impressed that Ruby even has the level of support in Windows that it currently enjoys. I would say that Windows hackers should keep up the good work and submit substantive patches as often as possible.

I switched from Vista to OS X this year. I made the stupid mistake of trying to develop Rails on a Windows machine. And it was not worth the trouble at all. If you're going to devote your life and livelihood to building software on Rails, do NOT do it on Windows.

I switched to OS X and I'm happier with my computer than I ever have been in my life.

And Rails works awesome.

I write my Ruby on Windows Vista and deploy on Ubuntu. And I've run into the usual set of headaches with doing this. Sometimes this results in me having to make fairly simple changes to, e.g., older versions of Capistrano to get them to work on my machine -- not too terrible because, after all, it is OSS Ruby code.

(I'm still running Cap 1.4.2 because it only took one line to make compatible. If I upgraded I would have to fix everything again.)

What flavor are the bugs? Usually, it ends up being a weak link in filesystem paths, SVN integration, or SSH integration. What causes these issues? Much respect for the folks who code them, I understand you do not owe anybody anything, but any honest assessment points to platform chauvanism.

"I do not use Windows, nobody I know uses Windows, true Ruby hackers are too cool to use Windows, begone ye Microsoft-infested slimeball"

The community (which I generally like and, let me note, actively contribute to) positively drips with this sentiment. DHH mentioned that 37signals wouldn't hire a Windows programmer (though he later backed down, somewhat), and the reasons were essentially tribal more than anything else.

And a big -1 to everyone who says that the Windows API is getting in the way of compatibility. Really folks? The Windows API being opaque made you hard code the path separator? The Windows API being opaque made parsing the results of a call to ls the more obvious choice than using the built-into-the-standard-library cross-platform way to get the contents of a directory? (To name just two implementation choices I've seen in Ruby libraries.)

1. The relative quality of many new Ruby libraries is extremely low. There are a lot of affected idiot hipsters who want to be the next DHH and think releasing every module they write will help with that.

2. Just run a headless VM to run your development in, since you don't have to deploy on Windows.

Yes it couldn't be easier to just run ubuntu. Once you do, you'll never go back to dealing with windows paths (Better for Java dev too).

http://wubi.sourceforge.net/

> What causes these issues? Much respect for the folks who code them, I understand you do not owe anybody anything, but any honest assessment points to platform chauvanism.

An awful lot of developers are just writing a library or application to solve a problem they have, and they write it to function on the platforms which they deploy to. They don't own Windows licenses, and don't have the time or the desire to test their work on Windows. I imagine that usually it simply doesn't occur to them! And why should it? They're not writing code that doesn't work on Windows; they're writing code that does work on the platforms they develop on and deploy to. That it doesn't work on Windows is merely an unfortunate (and probably accidental) side-effect.

Clearly you have a big problem with the attitude of many members of the community towards Windows developers and the Windows environment. This may not be unjustified. But to claim that "any honest assessment points to platform chauvanism [sic]" seems short-sighted and unfair.

Unlike most Rubyists, I do a fair amount of Win32 dev work on projects. I heard all the warnings about Windows being a second-class platform for Ruby, but it really hasn't played out that way for me. Things that work fine on Win32 Ruby:

* EventMachine for network I/O

* Win32API for FFI

* ActiveRecord for persistence

A lot of 3rd party Ruby libs won't work on Windows, of course, because they're build around Unixisms. But that's true of every other language too; it's just less obvious in Python because it has such a sprawling stdlib.

For what it's worth, these issues affect users of alternate implementations generally, such as JRuby.

Not updating changelogs is one thing that might be forgivable, but deliberately breaking things so that a specific platform isn't supported is pretty serious and a pretty serious alegation. Which projects are these, and how was Windows support broken?

Alas, I can't point fingers regarding things that I don't fully understand (I'm not a Windows developer or related to the projects claimed) - commentary is as good as I can do on the Windows side and I cannot quote e-mails without permission. One project that was mentioned, however, was DataMapper.

However, once I've investigated the claims, have permission, and got more of a story together, I'll be posting on Ruby Inside about it. There may or may not be a story, of course :)

Ouch, are you speaking about the 0.9.8 update? I have on fairly good confidence that there was nothing deliberate, but I'd be interested to hear what has been said on your end.

I can't betray confidence by quoting, but no specific malice was claimed, simply that the quality of the process behind some releases was nowhere near that which you'd expect from a popular project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com