[Ruby] FeedNormalizer doesn't get the "updated" field for entries

[Patrick Minton]

A colleague told me that FeedNormalizer's author was here in Seattle,  
so I thought I'd give this a shot.

I noticed that the implementation of simple-rss in feed-normalizer  
doesn't have an entry mapping for the "updated" tag:


       # entry elements
       entry_mapping = {
         :date_published => [:pubDate, :published, :dc_date],
         :urls => :link,
         :description => [:description, :summary],
         :content => [:content, :content_encoded, :description],
         :title => :title,
         :authors => [:author, :contributor, :dc_creator],
         :categories => :category
       }

So I added it to the entry mapping, and promptly got a "method  
missing" error.  It turns out I need to edit structures.rb as well,  
because the Entry class doesn't have "updated" in its ELEMENTS:

   # Represents a feed item entry.
   class Entry
     include Singular, ElementEquality, ElementCleaner

     HTML_ELEMENTS = [:content, :description, :title]
     SIMPLE_ELEMENTS =  
[:date_published, :urls, :id, :authors, :copyright, :categories]
     BLENDED_ELEMENTS = []

     ELEMENTS = HTML_ELEMENTS + SIMPLE_ELEMENTS + BLENDED_ELEMENTS

     attr_accessor(*ELEMENTS)

     def initialize
       @urls = []
       @authors = []
       @categories = []
     end

   end


So I added :updated to the entry_mapping hash in simple-rss.rb, and to  
the SIMPLE_ELEMENTS array of the Entry class in structures.rb.   
*Seems* to work.

Ok, so what's my question?

I'm just curious if this is an artifact of the simple-rss parser lib  
being older than the SimpleRSS gem (which *has* an updated method for  
its items), or if this was left out intentionally.  I'm also wondering  
if:

a) this solution is the best one and is sufficient to solve the problem
b) if this could get built into a patch for the gem.

b) would be especially nice because I would rather not freeze the gems  
in my rails project, since (so far) this is the only gem I've had to  
touch, and I'm using a lot of gems.

if a) is false, I'd love to hear more.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Patrick