[csw-maintainers] request for comments, on ruby multi-version support

[Philip Brown]

I'm hereby soliciting comments from other maintainers, reguarding a
new layout in the ruby package.

Currently, we have regular old /opt/csw/bin/ruby, as part of CSWruby

The latest submitted package, has /opt/csw/bin/ruby (amoung other
things) configured as an "alternative", pointing by default to
/opt/csw/bin/ruby18

Presumably, this is to allow future use of a ruby19 package side by
side, and to allow site admins to pick the default.

However.. what if both are installed, and someone wants to
autoconfigure something that uses the older ruby?
(such as facter, which,  last time I checked, does not work with ruby19)

Programs presumably autodetect for a "ruby" executable, rather than "ruby18".
There are also the ruby related executables of
irb
erb
rdoc
ri
testrb

Seems like, rather than having to hand-edit a bunch of files to call
frontend18 instead of frontend, they would rather just set their PATH
to something and use it naturally.

In other words, in cases like this, seems like our users will be best
served putting the version specific stuff somewhere like
/opt/csw/libexec/ruby18/ruby
and so enabling users to do
     PATH=/opt/csw/libexec/ruby18:$PATH
when they want to override more modern defaults for ruby.
(and then 'alternatives' can still be used, but just pointing to the
target under libexec)


Comments?