Summer of Code Looking for Mentors

Posted by kev Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:20:00 GMT

So it’s that time of year again. Google’s Summer of Code is just around the corner, and Pat Eyler is looking for mentors in the Ruby community.

Last year 10 Ruby projects were funded, but there can’t be projects without students and mentors.

If you’re interested in mentoring, send Pat an email at pat dot eyler at gmail dot com.

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mkrf 0.1.1 Released

Posted by kev Thu, 17 Aug 2006 20:23:00 GMT

Today I tagged mkrf’s 0.1.1 release. It fixes several of the shortcomings of it’s predecessor.

Read more...

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See Me at RubyConf 2006

Posted by kev Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:13:00 GMT

Yes, I will in fact be speaking at RubyConf this fall. Cool huh? My talk, “Life After mkmf” will cover the development and use of my Summer of Code project, mkrf.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by the problem of bending mkmf to you will and retaining your wits, you should see my talk.

To those who have noticed my weekly guides have come to a halt:

Sorry about that. They’ll resume as soon as I can find some time for them. In the meantime, know that there is other writing going on that I’ll talk more about later.

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mkrf 0.1.0 Released

Posted by kev Wed, 28 Jun 2006 10:41:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce that tonight marks the first release of mkrf, a library which generates Rakefiles to build C extensions to Ruby and is aimed at a replacement for mkmf. This is a Ruby Summer of Code project.

Though the gem doesn’t seem to have propogated yet, it should be availble through rubygems, and until then you can download the gem directly here.

The code does have RDoc included which I hope explains things well enough. Please do send questions and bug reports my way. I’ll have a project setup at advisr.org where you can submit bug reports as soon as I tweak its source to properly scope accounts, but until then email is fine.

Please do try mkrf with your extensions. Please do send feedback.

As for syntax, it can be as simple as:

 Mkrf::Generator.new('libtrivial_so.bundle')

or more complex:

 Mkrf::Generator.new('libxml_so.bundle', '*.c') do |g|
   g.include_library('socket','socket')
   g.include_header('libxml/xmlversion.h',
                    '/opt/include/libxml2',
                    '/usr/local/include/libxml2',
                    '/usr/include/libxml2')
 end

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Summer of Code

Posted by kev Sat, 27 May 2006 17:06:00 GMT

If you missed the announcement on ruby-talk, I’ve been accepted as one of the 10 sponsored projects for Google’s Summer of Code. I’m really excited :)

Anyway, a bit about my project “mkmf for Rake”. mkmf is a script/library/thing that is included with Ruby and is used to generate the Makefiles needed to compile C extensions for Ruby. If you look at it (please don’t, for your own sake), you can see that it has some issues:

  1. In its current state, it can’t be tested with Test::Unit easily. This makes it very hard to make changes without breaking things.
  2. It isn’t object oriented or modular, and basically can’t be reused in other projects.

mkmf needs to be rewritten but shouldn’t be modified. I’ll be writing an alternative which I hope solves the problems mkmf has, and it will use Rakefiles instead of Makefiles which should allow for things like RDoc generation easily down the road.

So here’s an opportunity for feedback (of course you can always contact me at kevin dot clark at gmail dot com if you have ideas, or on ruby-talk):

  1. What do you like about mkmf?
  2. What do you hate?
  3. What could be improved?

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