hello – a sample ruby project

This package contains a hello project which is meant to provide suggestions concerning how to structure and package ruby projects.

How to structure project directories, which auxilliary files to include in a distribution (README, CHANGELOG, etc)
providing source code documentation using rdoc approriate unit test
Automating tasks using rake
Functional testing using Test::Unit build support using rake
Packaging and distributing your project using rubygems.
Configuration and resource files.
Internationalizing your application or library.
Providing (and parsing) proper command line options
Handling plattform specific issues.
Distributing and promoting your project.

None of the suggestions here are set in stone, so feel free to do things diffrently if you feel it makes more sense. (I prefer to indent using tabs not spaces, which is the ‘norm’ in ruby). Consider this project to be a template that might help you through the tedium of setting up a project infrastructure to help you get coding real stuff quicker.

Installing

Having a “Installing” section is a bit of a chicken or egg question. Someone reading the README has, in all likelyhood already installed your package. On the other hand, in case your project has a more involved build process, it might be worthwhile to consider describing it in a seperate INSTALL file.

It can’t hurt to provide canonical instructions for installation, though. You can install the hello package by executing:

gem install hello -r

alternatively, you can download .tar.gz or .zip archives from Rubyforge.

Mailing List

In case you discover bugs, spelling errors, offer suggestions for improvements or would like to help out with the project, you can contact me directly ([email protected]) or through the mailing list ([email protected]).