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

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Fri Mar 18 17:19:34 -0400 2011:

> 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)

Easy.  The ruby18 package will retain higher priority until such time
as we decide to make 1.9 (or hopefully 2.x) the default.  This is in
line with other distributions:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/ruby*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 2010-11-30 20:34 /usr/bin/ruby -> ruby1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6200 2010-07-31 10:42 /usr/bin/ruby1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6224 2010-09-13 15:15 /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1

This can be announced well ahead of time giving people ample
opportunity to fix hash-bangs if they want to force a specific
version.  I don't expect a flip in the default for a year or two yet.
But there is a lot of demand for 1.9 as it offers many nice new
language features, a faster execution engine, etc.

> /opt/csw/libexec/ruby18/ruby
> and so enabling users to do
>      PATH=/opt/csw/libexec/ruby18:$PATH

_If_ we were switching the default preferred version of ruby in the
way you described, this might be worthwhile.  As we're not doing that
and users of 1.9 will simply hash-bang their new scripts bin/ruby19,
this isn't really an issue.

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302