[zimbatm]

It's not really clear what the issue is/are.

Anyone can propose a change. It just takes a lot of effort because language changes often have a lot of ramified implications. Most of the ideas are crap and it's frustrating to the originator but adding a process won't solve that issue.

Most of the discussions are available trough http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ or the ruby-core mailing-list and the language's behaviour is well defined thanks to the http://rubyspec.org/ project.

The only real issue that I know of is that some of the discussions are done in Japanese which secludes the biggest part of the developers. Instead of proposing a scatter-gun solution it would be great to have something specific in that regard.

[nwjsmith]

The largest issue seems to be that Ruby implementations other than MRI have to replicate its bugs in order to be considered a 'Ruby'. A language specification/design would help to solve that problem.

I for one would like to see a focus put on cleaning up the standard library (gem-ifying much of it?) rather than a design committee.

[waxjar]

I still don't really get the problem.

If a bug is recognised as such, simply don't implement it in the same way. If it's not, it's either a bug not previously discovered or intended behaviour.

[jinushaun]

Easier said than done when developers have "write once, run anywhere" expectations. Mono famously has to duplicate bugs when implementing .NET.

[amalag]

I think the Japanese language is a big issue and Matz's decision to not make changes to the GIL in spite of Rubinius making great progress in that regard.