Happy Winter Solstice,

I am pleased to finally announce the first public release of Ruby
Facets. Ruby Facets was born, as I imagine many such projects
are, over a period of years, as a growing collection of routines
for which I commonly found need. Recently the library had
grown large enough that I thought it might stand on its own. 
So a few weeks ago, I decided I'd go ahead and prepare a 
release. There was a good bit of work to do --organizing, 
documenting, testing; and I had the "bright" idea of scouring
the web for other tidbits that I might add. That turned into a
whole project in itself! But I persevered and now Facets is
finally polished enough for an initial offering.
  
Of course, there are still plenty of things left to do: write better
documentation, improve the tests and write a few yet missing,
improve the methods themselves, perhaps even a few improvements
in method and file names, plus error catching code --I'm sure there
are a number of places for that improvement, and of course there's
plenty of room for adding new goodies, too. In fact I hope the
Ruby community at large will take this opportunity to contribute any
extension methods used personally but deemed generally useful.
As the project manager I am quite open to the many possibilities.
Please contribute!

Being the very first release, I expect there may arise some
unforeseen bugs. If you come across any please let me know,
as soon as possible, so I can fix. You can contact me either 
privately or via ruby-talk, or through the new calibre-cuts
mailing-list:

  http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/calibre-cuts

My hope for Ruby Facets, and the other children of its parent
project, Ruby Calibre, is that Ruby will gain a vast and widely
used set of useful classes and routines in a nice all-in-one package
--Ruby's Tertiary library after Core and Standard, if you will.

Thanks and Happy Holidays, 
T.
