[csw-maintainers] ruby 1.9 madness

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2012/2/20 Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org>:
> So, it seems to me that I can either override the API number at build
> time and use three digit versioning in the package names to allow
> graceful transitions through the version/api matrix or use three digit
> naming but make those digits line up with the API versio giving us
> ruby191 for a package delivering ruby -v == '1.9.3'.  (The latter is
> what Debian does currently.)  A dummy ruby19 package could always
> point at the latest three digit version.
>
> I think I prefer the former and it doesn't sound like Debian is happy
> with their current solution[2], but neither is really appealing.

It looks like the main problem with the ruby191 package containing
ruby -v == '1.9.3' is that it confuses users, but it works well on the
technical level. I assume we're talking about the main ruby package,
the one that contains the interpreter executable.

You could have a "ruby19" wrapper package pointing to the newest one,
and keep the binaries in a package watermarked with the API version,
but done in such a way that it's clear to users that this has to do
with the version handling. For example, give it some horrible name
like "ruby19_api1", which will obscure the resemblance between strings
"1.9.3" and "1.9.1".

Maciej