Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide (2013)

Appendix 1. Support

One of the major features of open source projects is the technical support. Articles in the media often criticize open source efforts for not having the same tech support that a commercial product has. And boy is that a good thing! Instead of dialing up some overworked and understaffed help desk and being treated to music for an hour or so without ever getting the answer you need, we have a better solution: the Ruby community. The author of Ruby, the authors of this book, and many other Ruby users are willing and able to lend you a hand, should you need it.

The syntax of Ruby remains fairly stable, but as with all evolving software, new features are added every now and again. As a result, both printed books and the online documentation can fall behind. All software has bugs, and Ruby is no exception. There aren’t many, but they do crop up.

If you experience a problem with Ruby, feel free to ask in the mailing lists. Generally you’ll get timely answers from knowledgeable folks. However, as with all large communities, you may also find people with a less-than-perfect understanding of Ruby responding. As with all things on the Internet, use your judgment.

Before posting, do the right thing and search the Web for similar questions—by now most common questions have already been answered in the mailing lists or on someone’s blog. But if you can’t find the answer you need, ask, and a correct answer will usually show up with remarkable speed and precision.

A1.1 Web Sites

Because the Web changes too fast, we’ve kept this list short. Visit one of the sites here, and you’ll find a wealth of links to other online Ruby resources.

The official Ruby home page is http://www.ruby-lang.org .

You’ll find many open source Ruby projects on Github ( http://github.com ) and RubyForge ( http://www.rubyforge.org ). http://rubygems.org is the official RubyGems repository.[131] (GitHub used to be another source of RubyGems—this is no longer the case.)

http://www.ruby-doc.org is a portal to various sources of Ruby documentation. Much of it comes from previous editions of this book.

While you’re surfing, drop in on http://www.pragprog.com and see what we’re up to.

A1.2 Usenet Newsgroup

Ruby has its own newsgroup, comp.lang.ruby. Traffic on this group is archived and mirrored to the ruby-talk mailing list. It can be read via Google Groups.

A1.3 Mailing Lists

You’ll find many mailing lists talking about Ruby. The first three here are in English, and the remainder are mostly Japanese but with some English-language posts.

See the “Mailing Lists” topic under http://www.ruby-lang.org/ for details on joining a list.

The mailing lists are archived and can be searched here: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/ruby/ruby-talk/index.shtml or here: http://www.ruby-talk.org

A1.4 Bug Reporting

If you think you’ve spotted a bug in Ruby, you may want to browse the Ruby Issue Tracking system at http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/ . You may also want to check to see whether a new version of Ruby is available—perhaps the bug you’ve found has already been fixed.

Before submitting a bug, it might be a good idea to post a question about it to the ruby-talk mailing list. Often, one person’s bug is another person’s language feature. Also, Ruby can be complicated, and sometimes its behavior can be subtle.

Once you’ve decided you have a genuine bug, submit a bug report via the Ruby Issue Tracking site mentioned previosuly. When reporting a suspected bug, it’s a good idea to include the output of running ruby -v along with any problematic source code. People will also need to know the operating system you’re running. If you compiled your own version of Ruby, it may be a good idea to attach your rbconfig.rb file as well.

If you have a problem using irb, be aware of its limitations (see the reference section. See what happens using just Ruby itself.

Footnotes