The Debian/Ruby teams maintain the Ruby interpreters, libraries and applications. There are actually two different Ruby teams in Debian:
- the pkg-ruby team, which maintains the interpreter
- the pkg-ruby-extras team, which maintains libraries and applications
Both teams share some infrastructure, and have common members.
Most discussions happen on the debian-ruby mailing list. Discussions specific to pkg-ruby-extras also happen on the pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers list. You should be subscribed to both if you want to follow Ruby in Debian. We also use IRC (#debian-ruby on irc.debian.org) quite a lot.
Contents
pkg-ruby team (interpreters)
How you can help (
indicates difficulty: =easy, =hard):
- Go through bugs, see if you can reproduce them and provide more information. Report them upstream when needed.
- Subscribe to the pkg-ruby packages (ruby1.8, ruby1.9.1, ruby-defaults) on the Packages Tracking System, and then contribute to the bug mail you get. (It is a good idea to also subscribe to bugmail from Ubuntu, see developers reference for details).
- Checkout the Git repositories, see if you can provide a patch for some issues.
For all of this, you might need to learn basics of Debian packaging. See this page and the packaging-tutorial package.
pkg-ruby-extras team (libraries and applications)
Team Documentation and current packaging practices. Note that some of the docs might be outdated. Please improve them!
Alioth Project: http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ruby-extras
Current status of the gem2deb transition
Information for upstream developers: /RubyExtras/UpstreamDevelopers, /RubyExtras/OnRubygems
How you can help:
- Subscribe to the lists, and start contributing to discussions.
- Improve documentation (that page, the /Ruby page, etc..
- Use the Packages overview to go through all existing bugs, and see if you can help with solving some of them.
- Checkout the Git repository, and see if you can improve the existing packages. There are many things that can be improved!
Mid- and Long-term tasks
To learn about the recent stuff that happened in Debian/Ruby world, see this blog post.
Keep our packages bug-free and up-to-date
Start from the packages overview mentioned above.
Finish the transition to gem2deb
We are currently transitioning from a cdbs-based packaging tool to gem2deb, a modern dh-based tool. See /Packaging for details, and the transition status at http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/wheezy/ and http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/wheezy/details.html. Pick up a package tnat needs to be transitioned, and work on it.
Provide backports
Provide backports for the key Ruby packages (interpreter, rubygems) for both Debian and Ubuntu stable releases.
Switch to 1.9 as default
- Since we use alternatives, it is quite easy to switch to 1.9 as default. Switch to 1.9 as default using update-alternatives, and then report issues.
- Help porting ruby packages to 1.9. Here is a list of packages that needs porting help /RubyExtras/Ruby19Porting.
Package other Ruby interpreters
It would be nice to make progress towards having the same support for Rubinius and JRuby.
For JRuby, it is in non-free (see http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jruby.html) because of some dependencies. We can't depend on it if it stays non-free because it would make all ruby software part of contrib.
For Rubinius, there's an ITP (see #591817)
There's also mruby, there's an ITP but not moving forward
(see #697835)
Generation of ri and rdoc documentation
Currently we do not to generate the ri and rdoc documentation, as there are good online services providing it (like rdoc.info). We might change our mind later. 
Bonus points for solutions that do not require changing the existing packages.