I don't use Ruby, but... if people have so much time to whine about deprecated APIs, fork RubyGems, blog about it, and spam HN three times a day... can't they just fix the gems that use the deprecated APIs and move on with their lives? It's not as dramatic as creating Internet Drama, but it's probably much better for the community.
The Ruby community seems to have a lot of people with time on their hands (and strong opinions), but it seems that these people with time on their hands just rewrite the same shit over and over and over again. Move forwards, not sideways...
The reason Rubygems causes so much ire is that it is at a choke-point in the ruby ecosystem. Not every gem is actively maintained, so just fix the gems is easy to say, harder to do.
The rubgems maintainers are in a position to practically destroy Ruby's usefulness overnight by making frequent changes and deprecations, causing every installation to become a debugging nightmare and destroying millions of man-hours. To be sure, the emotional drama is boring, but the stakes are real.
I'm not sure I follow. Most of the posts I see are against the guy who did the fork, who appears to just want to do something, which he does. The posts also seem to advocate a social fix, and social fixes won't work without communication.
The Ruby community seems to have a lot of people with time on their hands (and strong opinions), but it seems that these people with time on their hands just rewrite the same shit over and over and over again. Move forwards, not sideways...