ActionORM and just recently some Bundler support are the only real changes I recall to Merb in months. We’ve already moved on but word is Merb is all but dead.

By the time a migration path is in place I think the Merb community will either have a new de-facto lead developer (by fork popularity?) or most Merb hackers will have moved on to Sinatra and/or Rack middlewares.

Either way everyone hacking Ruby wins. Rails people essentially get an upgraded more modular Merb by the time Wycats and Co are done hacking. Merb hackers enter into the promised land of ad-hoc, task specific web frameworks thanks to the true artists like Ryan Tomayko and Daniel Neighman who saw the potential of Rack long before I did.