A generic third-party Sessions library would be great.

I’d rather not see any of that stuff polluting Rack though. Rack is just fine as is IMO.

I also agree that if they slap some Rails things on top of Merb that would be great, however, I feel that it’s going to be ripping out sections of Rails with Merb, which will result in a hybrid of old Rails code and new Merb code. That would be uncool.

Ultimately I think we can all agree that there are good parts to the merger, and bad parts to the merger. The key really comes down to how it gets pulled off by the core teams, the communities acceptance of Rarb, and the desire of ‘alternative’ developers to keep fighting the good fight.

Also, I should clarify that when I say ‘alternative’ I don’t just mean web frameworks, I also mean ORMs (DataMapper, Sequel, etc…), testing (RSpec, Shoulda, etc…), and so forth.

Let’s all keep up the innovation that the Ruby community is known for. Let’s all keep each other on our toes, and let’s build the best software we can.

Personally I worry that DataMapper may be the red-headed stepchild in this merger, but I hope I am wrong. I do think that merging the two teams will be good for the ruby community in the long run, and rails will greatly benefit as a result of these two teams combining.

I think the ideal merger would leave the merb team enhancing merb core, and making the merb framework stronger with a focus of just being a framework for building web frameworks. rails would be a layer on top of merb in the style of merb-more.

I guess I would prefer if the rails guys decided to adopt the merb-core and build rails on top of it. It sounds like that is what might be happening, and if so, I don’t see why anyone would be unhappy about the merger…

We addressed this very issue when we discussed the possibility to merge with Rails. I agree that merb had a positive effect on rails and vice versa. It also drove the other frameworks which pushed us further.
The problem we faced was simple: do we want to keep competition just for the sake of it? Rails clearly told us: we want what you have and we would love you to work with us. So the options were:
- tell them to go to hell and let them try redo what we already did and know how to do.
- accept to work with them and make rails a better framework.

Option 1 would maintain the competition, but now you have 2 groups of people trying to do the same thing and being better at different aspects. The community gets confused and communication breaks.

Option 2: will loose the merb vs rails competition, but we double the amount of people working on rails and make it better.

We went with option 2, knowing that within the rails/merb team we will disagree and learn from each other. I hope you will keep us on our toes and the rest of the community will push us to be even better.

I wish you the best and hope we’ll get ot work together on some rack related stuff!

- Matt

Of course, if Yehuda and friends manages to do this Rails will definitely be awesome again. But until then, Rails is only what I do at work. Any Ruby frameworking I’ll need off hours will need to be filled by another framework, as I’m just tired of the terrible mess those Ruby retards brought to the language. The only thing Rails was initially good at was a purpose, not a code base. The code was gimmicky and reminds me of what some people write when they just need to get it working.

If this is the big refactor, as Merb had pushing up to 1.0 then so be it. Rails needs that in order to stay viable. At least Ez seems to feel that way about this.

Otherwise, its time to look at Mack again!