My post that called upon Ruby hackers to stop raging against the maintainers of RubyGems was unsurprisingly controversial. There are clearly a bunch of wounds that haven't healed yet, and no immediate sign that they'll get better. Personally, I think this whole situation sucks, and I want to help fix it.

Effective immediately, if you've got an issue that you felt was ignored, disregarded, or otherwise not properly handled by the RubyGems core team within the last six months or so, you can email me and let me know about it. I'll be collecting these emails, grouping them together, and then meeting up with the RubyGems maintainers to try to figure out what went wrong. I'll collect some notes and then do one of two things: a) get back in touch with you about how you can work to get the change you want to see made integrated into RubyGems, or b) write up a technical report with an official response from the core team about why your idea isn't going to work out.

I won't be rude to you, I won't ignore you, and I won't judge you based on your current or previous personal or technical conflicts with the RubyGems team. I will read what is bothering you, contact you for additional details if necessary, and try to get some honest and helpful answers for you from the folks who really know the RubyGems internals. In most situations, these are the sort of conversations that are best to happen in public, but we've seen how that hasn't been working out lately. I'm throwing my hat in the ring in the hopes that if I'm nice to you, and if I'm nice to the RubyGems folks, that we'll see some real progress instead of a bunch of worthless conflict that generates more heat than light.

If you haven't had a bad experience with the RubyGems team, I recommend that you continue to submit pull requests, bug reports, and support requests as needed via the ordinary process. Be civil and I think you'll get a civil response. But if that doesn't work out for you, contact me and I'll do what I can to get you answers. Let's face it, our most important project feels a bit like a powderkeg right now, and it doesn't have to.

One important thing to note is that I am not an active RubyGems contributor. This puts me at both an advantage and a disadvantage, since it means that my knowledge of the history of RubyGems is somewhat limited. What I'd ask you to do when you send me emails is to please give me enough context so that I know what you're talking about, and ideally make it so that your email is fairly self contained. If what you want to discuss is too complicated to give me an executive summary, at least provide links back to other resources so that I can do my homework and when I talk with the maintainers, I know where to point them to.

Please send your candid feedback about problems you've experienced with RubyGems to gregory.t.brown@gmail.com. Use the subject tag [rubygems] to help make sure I see your email. I will respond letting you know that it has been received, and then after I've got enough to go over with the maintainers, I'll get back to you with what I find out.

It is my hope that this sort of liason role I'm independently volunteering for is very much temporary, and can go away just as soon as we dig out all the thorns that have been jammed in our collective backsides for quite some time now. My main goal is not to convince anyone of anything about the project itself, but instead to see if I can better educate the Ruby community about what's going on with RubyGems, and also hopefully tie together some loose ends so that we can go back to focusing on doing awesome stuff, rather than fighting over the most boring but essential project we all work with.