Rails - Jan 2006 - [RFC] Are patches sitting too long in the tracker - PatchRails to the rescue?

Hi, List,

I read the ''this is why ror sucks'' - thread with some
amusement. I''m
pretty delighted by rails and would like to thank the community and 
especially the core developers for being great. I''m a little afraid
that
the last post to this thread hasn''t got the attention that it deserves 
and therefore I''d like to link it here again and combine it with a 
little ''Request for Comments'' - 
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/39897 . Andreas: 
Hopefully you''ve got no problem with me hitchhiking your post...

 From time to time - as many other railers - I''m trying to give 
something back to the community. Doing some Rails development since two 
month or so I''m still n00bish and my possibilities are limited to do 
something for the community. Anyway I try so by answering questions on 
the mailing list, writing something on the wiki and spread the word of 
rails to friends and colleagues. Lately I tried to give some feedback to 
different tickets on dev.rubyonrails.org. But enough of this shoulder 
padding myself... As I''ve said I''m not in a position that
allows me to
make big contributions. Looking at the list of pending patches and 
reading the linked post by andreas I get the impression that many others 
*are* in a position of making significant commitments *but maybe will 
get upset when patches are sitting in the tracker for ages*.

Nobody is to blame the small team of core developers for not working 
their way through the patches fast enough. To the contrary: One can''t
be
grateful enough for their effort to get 1.0 out and going so well. But 
nevertheless it needs to be in the mind of the community that skillful 
and engaged committers of patches shouldn''t get upset because their 
effort doesn''t make it to something useful not only for them but for
the
whole community.

The RFC: Have you got any ideas and thoughts of speeding up the 
evolution of rails while having in mind that rails shouldn''t get pumped
up to the ''for all and everything'' solution that made java
such an elephant?

Some thoughts of mine:

- Obviously one might argue: Patch a version for yourself! It wouldn''t 
be too hard to find the patches you are interested in yourself and use 
them. But then you would loose the comfort of using something that many 
others are using. You would totally rely on yourself in updating and 
maybe would disconnect further and further from rails trunk when time 
goes by. Resulting in something like a fork. Nobody in one''s right mind
would want that.
- Could something like PatchRails or ResearchRails (no tm) come to the 
rescue. A branch for people for whom even EdgeRails doesn''t feel
cutting
edge enough? And which would be a sandbox for testing features that 
should make it into EdgeRails...
- How could something like this happen? Is anyone interested?

just my two cents worth

Best Regards
Jan Prill