Advent of Ruby Changelog: Week 2

Every year since 2018, I write the annotated Ruby Changelog. This year I want to cover it in a day-by-day diary to make it a bit more visible—and to incentivize for the regular work.

Here is Week 2 of it!

Quoting from the 14th day (which is today):

[…] Two weeks of working on the changelog. This means something between 25 and 35 hours (~1.5-2 hours on a workday, more on the weekends) of time.

So, what was done during these two weeks?

• an amount of changelog texts no more than my regular blogpost (and much rougher);
• a lot of code studying, ticket reading, and head scratching;
• three documentation PRs:
  • a small cosmetic one just handling the rendering glitches;
  • a bigger (yet still pretty small) one with adjustment of phrasing and examples for several new methods;
  • and one more specific to WeakMap and WeakkeyMap;
• A couple of tickets:
  • One with a weird small (but very old) bug/inconsistency, for later discussions;
  • And another one about equally small inconsistency in the newly-introduced Dir methods, that was promptly fixed by Jeremy Evans (and, truth be told, probably would’ve been fixed anyway);
• A growing list of TODOs to eventually follow upon (most probably not before the release), related to small better docs and (mostly) small core API changes for more consistency;
• …definitely not enough sleep.

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So, here goes (each day is a link):

• Day 8, where new features are landing in Ruby’s NEWS.md, while I am working on a PR to fix small documentation problems in Ruby’s docs;
• Day 9, where I prepare one more documentation-fixing PR and notice some changes are still missing from NEWS.md;
• Day 10, where I dive head-first into finally writing a big part of the changelog, but also discover some small new inconsistencies to report, possible language improvements to pursue, and philosophical problems to ponder on;
• Day 11, where I try to proceed, but it entangled into some lack of understanding, old surprising behaviors, and historical discussions (and also meet my younger self accidentally);
• Day 12, where I recompile Ruby and investigate the new (if not yet fully materialized) possibilities that would be opened with the introduction of it anonymous block argument next year;
• Day 13, where I am almost done with the first, quick-and-rough part of the changelog;
• Day 14, where I am summarizing what was done and writing this blog post.

To be continued…

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