I'm a merbist and think this will be good for both the Merb and Rails communities.
That said, I'm a little afraid it will shaft the other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra, Camping). People might make interesting things only compatible with Rails.
When Merb was a pretty big, active minority, it was more compelling to go out of one's way to make interesting libraries (ORMs, gems, etc.) easily compatible with anything ruby.
Rails is gaining modularity, but I fear Ruby overall might lose it. Even after Rails and Merb merge, rails!=ruby.
Merbails consolidation may decrease the generality of some high-quality bundles of code. However, this may be better for the ruby ecosystem at large, especially as the New Relationship Energy with ruby is starting to level off.
Anyway, Merb isn't what Merb once was (mongrel+erb.)
This is a special case of Three Systems (from unix philosophy) where the second system was leaner and faster :)
It does seem that Sinatra has been gaining steam lately!
Off topic pet peeve: Can the internet try and avoid using the phrase "that said" from now on? It is really overused and unnecessary. There have been at least three articles linked to on HN in the last week that use it multiple times and it sounds really bad. Delete this if you like.
That said, I'm a little afraid it will shaft the other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra, Camping). People might make interesting things only compatible with Rails.
When Merb was a pretty big, active minority, it was more compelling to go out of one's way to make interesting libraries (ORMs, gems, etc.) easily compatible with anything ruby.
Rails is gaining modularity, but I fear Ruby overall might lose it. Even after Rails and Merb merge, rails!=ruby.