The Debian/Ruby Teams
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.
pkg-ruby (interpreters)
How you can help:
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).
Go through bugs, see if you can reproduce them and provide more information. Report them upstream when needed.
Checkout the Git repositories, see if you can provide a patch for some issues.
pkg-ruby-extras (libraries and applications)
Team Documentation: /RubyExtras. In particular, see the ?Joining the Team page. Note that ome of the docs are outdated, especially after the switch from Svn to Git.
Alioth Project: http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ruby-extras
Subversion repository (DEPRECATED): svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-ruby-extras/ (svn client), http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-ruby-extras/ (browser)
The /RubyInWheezy page documents the current packaging practices.
How you can help:
Subscribe to the lists, and start contributing to solving bugs.
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
Backports
Provide backports for the key Ruby packages (interpreter, rubygems) for both Debian and Ubuntu stable releases.
Finish the transition to gem2deb
We are currently transitioning from a cdbs-based packaging tool to gem2deb, a modern dh-based tool. See /RubyInWheezy for details.