[csw-pkgsubmissions] newpkgs ruby19, ruby19dev, ruby19ri, ruby19sa(...)

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Fri Apr 09 14:37:39 -0400 2010:

> Is ruby1.9 explicitly designed to be incompatible with 1.8?
> (if so, the writers need to learn what major numbering means :-} )

No, it's not intentionally breaking things, but it is a transitional
step on the way to 2.0.  Things have changed.  Many modules will work,
but others won't...especially binary modules.

Although I haven't followed it closely for a while, 1.9 was not
originally intended for general use.  2.0 is way off though and people
wanted some of the nice new langauge features, so they've started
using it anyway.  My mail client[1], for example, is almost at the
point of forcing me to use 1.9 instead of my (really old, RHEL5
supplied)
1.8.5.

> If incompatibility is a bug, rather than a feature, I dont think
> this is a good way for us to go.

People want both.  Some will _need_ both, at least for a while.

> As a side comment.. We only have a limited (under 10?) set of
> packages that need ruby.  If all of our packages are fine with the
> newer ruby, maybe we should just bump CSWruby, reguardless?

It doesn't work like that, unfortunately.  If you're running 1.8 with
a Rails stack (installed locally as gems, outside of the pkg world)
and all of a sudden we drop 1.9 in the place of 1.8, you're going to
annoy a lot[2] of people.

If apps want to move their dependencies to 1.9 instead, that's fine
with me, but we can't simply roll over the old version.

Thanks
-Ben

[1] Sup: http://sup.rubyforge.org/
[2] I don't know how many shops are using 1.8.  Most of them will
    likely be puppeteers, but we're using it for Rails here until we
    move that to some other gear.
-- 
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302