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

[Philip Brown]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Fri Mar 18 17:19:34 -0400 2011:
>...gine, 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.

You presume that users of ruby1.9, will only be writing new code, so
that its no big deal for them to set the first line explicitly. But
what if they are downloading and working with other peoples' code,
rather than writing their own?
OR, if they want to easily test if their code works with both versions?

So my comments are equally applicable, reguardless of which one is the default.
It may be that a particular site stays on default ruby=v1.8, but a
subset of the site's users primarily want to test out ruby1.9 heavily

It seems nicer to users, to put the collected (rubyX) executables in
/opt/csw/libexec/rubyX. This allows them to adjust their path one
time,  rather than force them to edit every script they want to work
with.

(reminder: both "#!ruby"   and "#!/bin/env ruby" work, for executable
ruby scripts. A full path is not required.)


Now how about seeing what other maintainers think about this?