RubyForge

» see rubyforge.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ruby has never been the language I get paid in, so this is not a site I had an account on. What I recognize is the shape of what it left behind. Anyone who has tried to build an old project on a new machine knows the particular silence of a package host that has stopped answering, and RubyForge going away put that silence into a decade of build scripts.

It started on 22 July 2003. Rich Kilmer and Tom Copeland at InfoEther stood up a fork of the SourceForge codebase, mostly PHP, and Ruby Central paid for the hosting. Ruby Central was a nonprofit founded in 2001 by the people who had organized the first RubyConf, which gives you the scale of the operation: a language community small enough that two consultants and a nonprofit could hand it its entire infrastructure.

Every project got the standard forge kit. A page, a file release area, a version control repository, a mailing list, a bug tracker. For a few years that was simply where Ruby lived, before Rails arrived and made the language famous.

~ the record ~

~ how it became infrastructure ~

RubyGems needed somewhere to put packages, and the somewhere it picked was RubyForge. Chad Fowler announced the integration work in June 2006, and after that the forge was not a place you visited but a place your machine talked to. Every gem install pulled from gems.rubyforge.org whether the person typing it knew the name or not.

That is a heavy load for a donated server. Through the Rails boom, when Ruby was arguably the most fashionable language in the industry and startups were being built on it at speed, the package supply for all of it ran through a nonprofit's hosting bill.

~ the handover ~

The fix came from outside. Nick Quaranto built Gemcutter in 2009 as a better gem host, it won the argument on merit, and by October 2009 it had become RubyGems.org and taken over as the canonical place gems come from. GitHub had already taken the code hosting side. RubyForge kept running for another four and a half years as an archive that nobody was migrating off, because the files still resolved and nothing forces you to move until it does not.

~ what broke when it went ~

Evan Phoenix announced on 10 November 2013 that the site would be gone on 15 May 2014, without much of an explanation. Six months is a generous notice by the standards of this inventory, and it was still not enough for projects whose last commit was in 2008.

When it went, a lot of things stopped resolving at once. Old Gemfiles pointing at gems.rubyforge.org, install instructions in a decade of blog posts and READMEs, download links in documentation for libraries people still had in production. Mailing list archives holding years of answers went with it. The projects themselves mostly survived on GitHub, but the URLs did not, and a URL is the part everyone else's code was holding onto.

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