Re: Changing the default version of Ruby to be 1.9

[Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>]

On 01/03/2012 02:29 AM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 02/01/12 at 13:13 -0500, Sam Ruby wrote:
> > The Ruby team has indicated that they plan to stop providing bug
> > support for Ruby 1.8.7 later this year, and to drop all support next
> > year:
> >
> > http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2011/10/06/plans-for-1-8-7/
> >
> > The Rails team has indicated that they will be dropping support for
> > Ruby 1.8.7 with the next major release, expected to occur later this
> > year:
> >
> > http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2011/12/20/rails-master-is-now-4-0-0-beta
> >
> > Given that Debian already provides support for changing the default
> > version, wouldn't it make sense for the next release of Debian (and
> > the next release of Ubuntu, given that 12.04 is intended to be LTS
> > release) to default to Ruby 1.9.3?
>
> Taking http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/wheezy/details.html, I
> think that we should migrate or remove all packages with popcon>  200
> (for the Ruby package).
>
> At this point, I think that we should file wishlist bugs for the
> remaining packages. Anyone willing to do that? (with a usertag, etc)
>
> Also, there's some mess to clean up. The 'rails' source package should be
> replaced by the 'ruby-rails-2.3' source package by introducing
> transitional packages.
>
> Finally, we should test what happens when 1.9 is used. Everybody, please
> install ruby-switch and run 'sudo ruby-switch --set ruby1.9.1'.
> At least apt-listbugs is currently broken when I do that.

I'm willing to try.

By way of introduction, Linux has been my primary operating system for 
over 10 years.  I started with RedHat, jumped to Debian in 2003 when 
there was uncertainty caused by the creation of Fedora, jumped to Ubuntu 
8 months later as Debian (at the time) was not dependably putting out 
release at that time.  I've been a happy user of Ubuntu ever since.

ruby-switch is not found using Ubuntu 11.10.

I downloaded debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso with the intention of 
running it inside VirtualBox.  Graphical install froze: no response to 
tab keys or mouse.  Non-graphical mode puts out what appears to be an 
unending stream of "INFO: kbd-mode: setting console mode to Unicode 
(UTF-8)" messages.  Trying control-C produces a Segment Fault, after 
which the messages resume.

If I can get a working setup, I will debug apt-listbugs and submit patches.

Rails 2.3 is not out yet, but if somebody can point me to the 
instructions on building a package that will be accepted, I will see 
what I can do.

- Sam Ruby
> Lucas