Introduction: Jeroen van Meeuwen

Hey there, I wanted to introduce myself wrt. to what I do with Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Ruby applications; - I'm the owner of Ruby in current Fedora releases, after Akira Togah orphaned it. Various people have been helping me with it as I'm both under time constraints as well as lacking some of the more detailed technical Ruby knowledge, and one person I wanted to name in particular is Mamoru Tasaka. - I'm the owner of the puppet package for scalable, consistent and efficient configuration management, after David Lutterkort has done an awesome job in like the 5 or 6 releases before I became his successor. Amongst others, Todd Zullinger is a great help. Included amongst the packages that I own is some of the dependency stack for specific deployments (ruby-RRDtool, rubygem-mongrel, fastthread, etc, etc). As a consultant, I -to some extent- commercially benefit from these packages and so I think I should also step up and take some responsibility for those packages to be available upstream, besides it being so much more efficient and so much more fun to share and collaborate. - I package a few Ruby Gems, which, mostly, are also dependencies of a Ruby on Rails web application my company is developing (deadline Oct 31st). Again I can only emphasize that I find it very important I share the work that I do as part of it's Release Engineering team with the rest of the community. This development team uses Fedora servers (while they are targeting EL-6 for customer deployments). One of my responsibilities inherently, is to make sure that the platform that is supposedly the basis of EL-6 (along with EPEL-6) is sufficiently stable, bug-free and contains what our RoR web application requires (hopefully also rubygem-passenger/mod_passenger, a.k.a. mod_rails/mod_rack, for which I've submitted a review). Furthermore, I'm involved in various other areas of the Fedora Project such as the Ambassadors, Fedora EMEA e.V., the Spins SIG and Fedora Unity. What I hope to get from this list is actually two-fold; On the one end, like I said, I'm not at all experienced in programming RoR or even just Ruby. I want to pick brains and get people that do know how RoR and Ruby to tell me what's going on ;-) I hope to be able to ask questions and get some answers/opinions/ideas on whether something is going to work or destroy stuff, and whether the direction we're going in is the right one, to ultimately improve Fedora's performance and option value as a Ruby development platform for all of our consumers. On the other end, I have a lot of endorsement from Operator Groep Delft in the Netherlands (my employer) to make sure that what we do (need to do and thus do anyway) is available to everyone, including the not-yet-publicly-available package development on Ruby 1.9.1 -more on that later on this list, I hope. Kind regards, Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip