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At first, please forgive probably offtopic and/or notconstructive question, but I truly have no idea where to ask it. At first I targetted StackOverflow there's at least some PIK-related traffic visible, but Programmers seem more relevant (although there seems to be not a three words here about PIK..).

Some time ago I was looking for a quick way to predictably and repeatibly setup Ruby environments and I've found PIK to be relatively easy and usable. Note that I'm not a full time Ruby developer, I use it more as a "quick hacking console" and "lightweight Bash replacement" on Windows.

For the last one or maybe even three years I was happily using PIK for isolating Ruby's ENVS from the normal windows shell environment. I've also came up with some extensions, both to windows's shell and PIK itself, and from time to time I feel the urge to publish them. They include simple things from running a script by doubleclick alike to .vbs or .bat, to more interesting ones like drag&dropping files onto a .rb script, to some fairly esotheric like emulated support for shebangs like #!/bin/ruby-187 #!/bin/ruby-193 so you can easily switch Ruby runtimes in the scripts lying on your desktop.

Some background covered, let me then ask the awful question: is it worth publishing?. No, obviously almost everything usable is worth that. My point is more about the feeling that I maybe I could spent that time better, there's no point in polishing dead tools, and as I search the web, I see very little movement in the subject :)

  • Are such extensions actually needed, or maybe they do exist and I simply reinvented a wheel? Do you, Ruby users, feel "lack" of them in your "everyday use" of Windows?
  • Is the PIK alive, getting popular or dying? is it known/used throughout the windows/ruby community, or should I adapt my addons to other managers?
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You might have to accept silence as an answer. –  MrFox Mar 8 '13 at 15:51
That's 100% true. –  quetzalcoatl Mar 8 '13 at 16:13
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1 Answer

I took kinda life support maintenance of Pik when Gordon (the original author) left the OSS community.

While I would like to say Pik is still alive, no new feature has been added to it over the past few years, simply because most of what it was required for it to do was doing properly.

I use Pik every day to switch versions and I couldn't live without it.

However, new versions of Ruby and new platforms for Ruby itself being added are making Pik become out-of-date, yet still useful.

Pik itself is written in Ruby, not a simple project, yet is still Ruby.

Certain tricks and extra tools are used to generate installers and executables of it, but it contains specs to confirm the proper behaviors.

You can find Pik source code here

Feel free to raise questions and send patches that make Pik and how to develop it more easy.

Contributors are always welcome.

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