I'll take quality over quantity any day. 
Ruby's library will probably never be as large as CPAN for a few
reasons.
* Several modules just don't make sense and/or aren't needed in Ruby
(e.g. most modules that start with "Class::").
* There is often overlap in functionality that Ruby has done a pretty
good job of avoiding so far.
* Some modules that are still external in Perl are part of the stdlib in
Ruby (e.g. libwww).
* The Ruby community doesn't do "Acme::" modules (and I hope it stays
that way).
I'd say only about 1/3 of the modules on CPAN are actually "good"
(though some are exceptional, e.g. DBI). The rest are outdated,
redundant, very highly specialized, unused or just plain suck. No, I
don't have anything to back that up. Just a general impression after
using Perl as my primary language for several years.
Regards,
Dan
···
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Lyman [mailto:lymans@gmail.com]
I found this page after a bit of googling:
http://www.cpan.org/indices/du-k.gz
... so what part do we care about comparing ourselves to? I
know we're not a Perl clone, but it seems like we'd have won
a major 'battle' in PR if we can say (in some shape or form)
that we have a 'collection' as large as CPAN.-Rich