[Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers] new debian ruby person

[Rudi Cilibrasi]

Hi everybody,

I have been lurking on the Debian mailing lists for about a year and a
half now, and am finally beginning to feel ready to join up with the
team.  I must admit there are still some vagaries in the process to me
and so will need a little guidance.  I do C and Ruby mostly nowadays
and try to avoid the other languages.  I am interested in ML
(particularly HOL/Isabelle/ISAR) however I am not yet proficient
enough to be productive.  I once made a linear resolution style
automatic theorem prover (first order predicate logic only) in school
which may interest others on the team.  This is the project that made
me learn to dislike C++ around 1999.

I am now a PhD student in Holland about to finish (I hope!) and have
made up some open source software over the years.  For the first 12
years of my programming life I had no internet and so worked alone
without community support.  My first public piece of open-source code
was 1 line in the linux kernel many years ago (v1.3.something)
regarding MAC network addresses.  Next I helped Matz and Nobu debug a
bit of Ruby (floating point marshalling and threading issues for
scientific programming) to make it usable for my research work.  In
the last three years I started my main project at
http://complearn.org/
 an open-source data-mining system based on some rather exotic
mathematical ideas using Kolmogorov Complexity theory while studying
under Dr. Paul Vitanyi.  I have had a tough time packaging it properly
(it has about 15 dependencies) and would appreciate any help the
debian experts can give me here.  For some reason I can't build a
usable .deb without using the fully automatic tools (like
checkinstall/installwatch) and these of course do not offer me the
configurability I need to make debian source and binary packages.  You
can see in the source tree (under the core directory) where I have a
debian subdir my attempt at making a debian package.  CompLearn is
suitable for generalized pattern recognition in a variety of contexts
and will surely be my main priority in the coming year or two.

I have also been involved in two dying projects: a defunct Ruby
binding to GSL (now better done by others thank goodness) and a
perhaps nearly obsolete Ruby / MPI binding called mpiruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpiruby/
This project may still be useful as I do hear user reports a few times a year...

I am also involved in a more useful and quite usable (but getting old)
project at
http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/#ruby
This is a Ruby binding of LibSVM, a very powerful machine learning
system similar to neural nets but with some advantages.  I have not
updated this for a while.  I have made an autoconf packaging of the
LibSVM library but Chih-Jen seems uninterested in incorporating it
into the main source tree.  I guess I will have to figure out how to
"wrap on" or "patch on" these new configure.ac and other sources
etc... I rememer reading something about it already in one of the
debian manuals.  I was hoping to be able to make a deb package for
both LibSVM and libsvm-ruby1.8 ... but so far I have not yet succeeded
at this.

I am guessing that it might be easiest to start off small and try to
properly package libsvm and libsvm-ruby1.8.  I look forward to hearing
any helpful infos team members might have in this regard.

Cheers,

Rudi