Re: status of 1.9[.3] and wheezy
Ohai!
On Oct 3, 2011, at 4:27 AM, Alex Young wrote:
>> I agree with making 1.9 the default, since that's what everyone who
>> works with Ruby today expects. On the other hand, I think it's premature
>> to drop 1.8 since it is still heavily used and there is a lot of code
>> out there that does not support 1.9. For example, look at this report
>> from New Relic:
>>
>> http://blog.newrelic.com/2011/09/28/state-of-the-stack-a-ruby-on-rails-benchmarking-report-sept-2011/
>
> That's a circular argument: those applications are almost certainly
> running on 1.8 because that's the distro-supplied ruby version (or was
> when the app was born), not because they've explicitly chosen it in
> preference to 1.9.
This is exactly correct.
Major/popular Ruby projects and frameworks are dropping support for 1.8 entirely. While not indicative of every project and library out there, this sets a trend and others will follow. Those that don't will be replaced with 1.9 compatible libraries, or forked and updated separately.
> Does Debian Ruby have a goal of providing a first-class deployment
> platform for third-party Ruby applications? I would argue that it's a
> goal not worth chasing because the libraries move too fast, and that it
> should be made clear that the user who wants to do this should be using
> RVM, rbenv+ruby-build or even checkinstall, and make that as easy as
> possible to do: it's worth knocking up virtual packages to install the
> dependencies for building the various interpreters, but not the
> interpreters themselves.
Debian has a reputation for being unfriendly to Ruby projects and developers. It is oft derided as a deployment platform for Ruby applications due to previous practices (particularly treatment of RubyGems bindir). The awesome work by this team for Wheezy helps tremendously!
While I love RVM and use it on my OS X systems, I much prefer a package installed Ruby interpreter. Most of my Debian/Ubuntu deployment is to cloud-based instances, which give me multiple cores and gigs of memory in 2 minutes with an API call. Waiting to compile Ruby is sub-optimal.
> I personally think 1.8 should be dropped from Wheezy in favour of having
> a 1.9.3 system ruby. I say this with a couple of MLOC running on
> 1.8.7-p302 in squeeze that I'll have to update to 1.9. It's better to
> do a small job well than half-do a bigger one.
I agree with moving to 1.9.
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