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Re: Ruby changes for Wheezy



On 06/03/11 at 11:22 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le dimanche 06 mars 2011 à 10:58 +0100, Lucas Nussbaum a écrit : 
> > > You are just going to empower users to shoot themselves in the foot.
> > 
> > What if users want the ability to shoot themselves in the foot?
> 
> Currently you’re the one holding the weapon.
> 
> > Also, you seem to assume that Ruby 1.9 is completely broken. That's not
> > true. A lot of things still work after switching from 1.8 to 1.9.
> 
> I don’t know whether Ruby 1.9 is broken or not. What I’m sure of, is
> that with your proposed dependency scheme, you will not be able to
> ensure dependencies will be installed for Ruby 1.9. Which means changing
> the Ruby version with alternatives would just break user systems. 
> 
> If users want Ruby 1.9, serve them Ruby 1.9 and get rid of the
> applications not supporting it (or use explicit versions for them). But
> don’t serve them a system that is half-compatible with Ruby 1.9 and not
> up to the stability expectations of a Debian system.
> 
> If you choose to support several Ruby interpreters through alternatives,
> you have to specify the interface that /usr/bin/ruby provides, just like
> for Java. This means settling on the lowest common denominator of what
> these interpreters can provide - and this is *completely opposite* to
> the users’ request, since they want to benefit from the improvements in
> Ruby 1.9.

Note that, for applications written in Ruby and packaged in Debian, we
will make sure that they work no matter what /usr/bin/ruby points to (if
necessary, by forcing the shebang to ruby1.8, and installing the correct
dependencies). What might break is software manually installed by users.
I don't see how that situation is different from the Java one.

> > Anyway. We are early in the wheezy release cycle. If switching ruby
> > implementations using alternatives turns out to be a bad idea, we can
> > switch back to the former approach at some point. And we will arguments
> > to reply to users who currently want it. 
> 
> Do you really need to break hundreds of user systems just to make a
> handful of whiners happy?

I am under the impression that it's not "a handful of whiners", but that
the consensus in the Ruby community is that we should switch to
alternatives.

- Lucas


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