1. What's this all about?

This is a project to profile Ruby interpreters on Linux systems. The original
project ran on Gentoo, but I am porting it to openSUSE 11.1. One of the reasons
I've moved this to GitHub and opened it up is to get people who know other
distros to test out the dependencies.


2. What do I need to know to join in?

You need to be a Ruby programmer, and you should know C and GCC fairly well.
Right now, everything is in a Rakefile or "ordinary Ruby", but I am planning to
move to Igal Koshevoy's "AutomateIt", because that offers an easy way to do the
multi-distro stuff that's required. So some familiarity with AutomateIt would
be good.

You'll need to know "oprofile". And if you're actually working on your own
Ruby (or other) interpreter, you'll probably want to be familiar with the
concepts in the PDFs at http://www.agner.org/optimize.

And since we're on GitHub, you'll need to know Git. Almost everyone in the open
source world knows more about Git than I do, so that shouldn't be a big problem.


3. What tasks are there?

a. Port to AutomateIt: Ed Borasky
b. Port to openSUSE: Ed Borasky
c. Port to Ubuntu Hardy Heron: TBD
d. Port to Fedora 10: TBD
e. Testing / report generation on Rubinius: TBD
f. Testing / report generation on Ruby 1.9.1: TBD
g. Testing / report generation on jRuby: TBD

Note that there are no tasks to test any variant of MRI / C Ruby 1.8.x. The
tools will of course work with those, but I view that activity as having
little value. You are welcome to fork this project to test MRI. :)


4. What's the long-term goal (besides world domination?)

The only thing I want to do with this beyond building the framework is to
profile the R language interpreter. But that's months away, if it even ever
happens. So for now, let's just get this world domination thing up and running.


5. What's the license?

GPL v 3. Most of the tools used are GPL, so it would be difficult for me to use a different license.