Ryan Bigg, a Ruby and Rails developer and author, writes about Rails, open source, hiring, and Ruby tooling.
HN links his Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM and Rails setup guide, which one commenter found extremely useful, plus his Rails asset pipeline guide and MIME types post.
On the topic of copy editing you raise: I wrote a book in DocBook for Manning in 2010. DocBook is XML, so I structured it with opening / end tags on their own line, content in the middle. As you would with a HTML document.
After copy editing multiple chapters, they sent it back to me with all the content on a single line. I was so incredibly upset that they ditched all my painstaking format that I almost abandoned the project there + then.
It sounds like from your experience that it has barely changed. I ended up moving to self-publishing so I have a greater control over the whole process. I wrote it up long-form here: https://ryanbigg.com/2015/08/my-self-publishing-success-story
Ruby? No. Rails? Perhaps. (Both github and gitlab are built with ruby on rails).
For an old post on a somewhat related topic, see:
https://ryanbigg.com/2009/04/how-rails-works-2-mime-types-respond_to
I could imagine the mix of rails #respond_to and "file extensions" at the end of urls might make a mess (think /users/profile/smith.html vs /smith vs /smith.json vs /smith.txt - essentially what might have been /smith?format=json etc).
Ed: current documentation:
https://apidock.com/rails/v6.1.3.1/ActionController/MimeResponds/respond_to
I know it can be frustrating to have a software not work as expected but, I don't think Ubuntu is doing too bad in this respect (I have been using Kubuntu @ work and Fedora at home for the past 2-3 years). The author IMO is a bit too harsh on Ubuntu. On a somewhat related note, I think people should also read this while passing judgement on another OSS (esp bug fixes):
http://ryanbigg.com/2010/04/want-it-give/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255905
Check out the Ruby on Rails guide on the subject:
http://ryanbigg.com/guides/asset_pipeline.html
DHH also talked a lot about it in his keynote this year at RailsConf:
http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-keynote-streaming-live-from-railsconf-2011-right-here-right-now-4769.html
I posted the following guide the other day:
http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you
Sadly it languished with no upvotes. :( I found it extremely useful, however!
I follow this guide to set up rvm, ruby, and rails: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/