It's just such a better outcome, nobody needs to change workflows its just that information gets reported upstream earlier in a much more useful time.
Heroku does sponsor Matz, Nobu, and Koichi. We hired them and give them a full time salary to work on Ruby.We don't tell them what to work on (i.e. we don't dictate what features or projects get shipped in what versions) it's more like corporate sponsorship. GitHub hired tmm1. Beyond that CRuby has a host of other non-sponsored contributors that contribute code and doc patches as well as set up tooling. You don't need corporate sponsorship for that, you need a passion and some time. You, in fact, could be the very person that sets up this automated system.
I find the attitude of '<company x> should sponsor <thing y>' a bit misguided. While I agree that companies who profit from a OSS should give forwards to OSS, individual contributors are ultimately they only way progress gets made. If you or someone reading this works for a company making money off of Ruby do that thing! Tell your boss you can't deploy on friday afternoon and have to fix a bug in the Ruby codebase. Ship the project on company time, and then boom...your company just sponsored that thing. It's like magic!
Anywhoo, yes finding out what things are blocking the MRI team from adopting a tool/technology and working around them can be extremely valuable. For example Matz has agreed to move the codebase development to github. This would make contributions a bit easier, however there is a blocker. There are a ton of SVN bots and tooling written around the current workflow. Right now the Ruby core team wants to spend time focusing on pumping out C code to fix bugs, improve performance, and progress the language forwards. They don't want to go off into the woods on tooling. These types of projects could be hugely impactful to the team and don't require C knowledge so most Ruby devs may be able to help. I encourage you and others to reach out to the core team to ask them what tooling projects they need and how we can help them. Understanding why someone isn't using a tool/technology is a really good start.
tldr; Good idea, let's talk to the core team about ways to help with tooling.
And even if there wasn't, @brixen has repeatedly pointed out how the MRI authors have chosen to ignore the RubySpec project entirely. That's really sad.
Note that I'm not trying to criticize this position, rather, I'm pointing out that the core Ruby team seems to have different goals than, say, the community around Java or C#.
Cucumber provides better reporting than JUnit/TestNG. For web testing you have watir. For SOAP services you have savon which IMO is much easier than SOAPUI. For RESTful web services you just make direct calls. Then there is sikuli for ad hoc GUIs.
Long story short (and hope my facts are right! not swearing by this, was just some googling...), I had to optimize some old code for an RoR client I freelance for and wanted to add in some more advanced ORM (still fairly simple though, mapping entity results from a stored procedure query). All the solutions I saw for this involved kindof hacking the db connector to execute some raw queries. I was curious as to why such a basic feature wouldn't be natively supported, so eventually I found some forum posts asking why it isnt (it may be by now) and all the responses were in the vein of: "That is not the Rails way and therefore the core team chooses not to support those types of features".
I know people think Java is too bulky & sprawling but after 6 months with JPA, SpringData, Spring JDBC etc. I was kindof left with the feeling "Man, there is a bit of a learning curve to pick up the overarching concepts of the Java ecosystem and its design paradigms at first, but once you are over that hump you can do more, easier with any ORM lib than with ActiveRecord". I know there is another Ruby ORM gaining traction (DataMapper) but it just seems that the opinionated nature of Ruby/Rails core dev teams makes it doomed & dangerous for enterprise use (and indeed maybe its not even their goal).
The Java approach is bulky and design-by-committee for sure but their userbase seems to demand that the fullest possible spectrum of features be supported, and then the library developers try to provide their recommended approach for new projects. Also the specs expand pretty quickly... had to use JPA 2.0 for some projects and found myself constantly frustrated because in the advancement to 2.1 there seemed to be a landslide of awesomeness added to support missing advanced database features.
I guess its one of those things where now it feels like a breath of fresh air thinking "I have more power in my pinky than....". It's a shame too cuz I still get calls from companies in a lurch desperate for RoR devs but philosophically I just can't bring myself to go back in that direction after seeing how unscary & mind-bogglingly powerful the enterprise langs have become. In part thanks to RoR, I'm sure! Wouldn't mind using it for front-end but all that stuff is so interchangeable, the syntax diffs are barely noticed in the development process. I think really the only front-end techs with noticeable differences in feel are the ones with advanced data-binding/component libraries.
Maybe there are some mind-blowing gems out there now though? Who knows....
