Tattle: The Ruby Census

Eric Hodel | Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:23:51 GMT

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The most-requested feature for RubyGems is the addition of a platform preference for automating installs and ignoring gems for the platforms you aren’t on. In order to help get there, Jim, Chad and Bruce have put together tattle:

At the first Rails Edge conference, Jim Weirich, Bruce Williams, and I were chatting about how to improve the RubyGems platform-specific behavior, when we realized that it would be really helpful to have more info about the install footprint of the Ruby community at large.

So instead of going right into hacking RubyGems as was our plan, we created a little census tool and an accompanying web site to help us collect information. Most of the info we collect is from Config::CONFIG, with the addition of the RubyGems version.

We know this information will help the implementers of RubyGems, and we hope it will also help Ruby implementers and library developers as well.

To install:

$ sudo gem install tattle

To submit your info:

$ tattle

If you want to see what would be posted before posting, you can do:

$ tattle report

The information gets posted to http://tattle.rubygarden.org. You can view the posted data with your web browser at that URL.

—Tattle: The Ruby Census via ChadFowler.com 3 comments

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Less than 4% on Windows, interesting.

It would be nice if the script queried the user so as to separate development systems from production environments in the reports view.

evan said about 1 hour later

Well, Evan, we’re in hour 1. :) I expect to see the numbers for MS Windows eventually settle near the top, just as I expect the numbers for OS X to drop.

Your idea for separating development from production is a good one. I think you would see a lot of Windows and OS X for dev, and a lot of Linux/Solaris/BSD for production.

Daniel Berger said about 1 hour later

The data was front-loaded with a heavy OS X contingent before tattle was officially announced, so there is a bit of unnatural bias to the data.

Eric Hodel said about 4 hours later

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