Recent Gems and Gem::Specification#description=

Eric Hodel | Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:14:00 GMT

Posted in

Jim Weirich provides a recent gems RSS feed that will put the most recently uploaded gems in your favorite RSS feed reader. Unfortunately it needs some help. The body of each gem's entry is filled in from the the gemspec description field which some Gem authors neglect to fill in.

Its really easy to fill in the description field of your gem: 

spec = Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.name = 'mogilefs-client'
  s.version = '1.1.0'
  s.summary = 'A Ruby MogileFS client'
  # Just add this line right here!
  s.description = 'A Ruby MogileFS client.

MogileFS is a distributed filesystem written by Danga Interactive.

This client supports NFS mode and has untested support for HTTP mode.'
  s.author = 'Eric Hodel'
  s.email = 'eric@robotcoop.com'
  # ...
end

If you haven't filled in your gem's description please do so now so it shows up in your next release. Currently I see several gems with interesting names in the feed but without a description I'm not that interested in looking at them. They might not be as cool as their names sound. 8 comments

Comments RSS FEED

A bigger gripe is that the URL in the item is almost always broken.

http://onestepback.org/gemwatch/cmdparse-2.0.1

gives a 404, as so many of the others.

(and ‘preview’ on your sire seems broken: ‘No blcok given’ error. :( )

James said about 5 hours later

Yes, but only Jim knows the secrets of why URLs are wrong.

The preview comment button is working for me. I’d upgrade to the latest and greatest Typo, but I’m about to leave for five days and don’t want more breakage.

Eric Hodel said about 5 hours later

Funny, I was just going to gripe about the lack of descriptions in gems myself. You beat me to it. :)

Daniel Berger said about 8 hours later

Yes, but only Jim knows the secrets of why URLs are wrong.

The URL got broken when I added some XML elements to the feed to pass the feed validation. I haven’t had a chance to go back and look at why they broke yet.

Jim Weirich said about 18 hours later

It appears that NetNewsWire is using the guid instead of the link field.

    <item>
      <title>Gem gem_plugin - 0.2.1</title>
      <guid>http://onestepback.org/gemwatch/gem_plugin-0.2.1<;/guid>
      <link>http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/</link>
      <description>A plugin system based only on rubygems that uses dependencies only</description>
    </item>

(that ; is not there, its some problem with Textile)

Eric Hodel said 1 day later

Yep, I accidently dropped the link element when I added the GUID. Ah well…

It’s fixed now. Hopefully bloglines will pick up the changes on new gems.

Jim Weirich said 1 day later

The feed now has both a link and a guid element. But Bloglines insists on using the guid as the link on the main title, and using the link element in a smaller font “link” at the bottom. How is NetNewWire handling it?

Jim Weirich said 1 day later

NNW is using the GUID too :(

Maybe you could make the GUID be the same as the link with ?gemver=gem_plugin-0.2.1 on the end?

Eric Hodel said 2 days later

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