[ruby-core:21965] Re: New hash : syntax for the 1.8 series?

Urabe Shyouhei wrote:
> Every single ruby release was a bridge version for ruby 2.0 anyway; take a look
> at those "parenthesize argument(s) for future version" warnings :p
> 
> Whether 1.8.8 should follow 1.9 fashion is beyond me, but I like 1.8.7 for
> being the most powerful 1.8 version I've ever seen.
> 
> Also note that I cannot maintain 1.8.6 forever.  I think it wiser for you not
> to stay 1.8.6 once it reaches its end, like when I finished 1.8.5.  That day
> comes sooner or later.

I hope there's some consideration for alternative implementations as 
well. If you were us, what would you do? Support only 1.9.1 features? 
Move to 1.8.7? Support 1.8.6, 1.8.7, and 1.9.1? And then add 1.8.8 on 
top of that?

It's to be expected alternative impls will always be chasing the 
"current" Ruby, but releases like 1.8.7 make even harder to find a 
slow-moving target to build toward. We do not want to abandon 1.8.6 
users, but with an even smaller dev team than core Ruby, we can't afford 
to maintain N branches for N production versions of Ruby. So for the 
moment, we only have resources to do 1.8.6 and 1.9.1, with a huge 
emphasis on 1.8.6.

And then this also affects adoption of the other releases. We've heard 
from many people that have not moved to 1.8.7 or 1.9.1 because the 
alternative impls have only been 1.8.6 compatible. We've heard from 
others that they might consider moving to 1.9.1 once JRuby has support. 
And at the same time we hear from users who see our continuing work on 
making JRuby's 1.8.6 mode more and more solid and want us to stay there 
forever. It's a balancing act complicated by having many drastically 
different production branches of the C impl.

A lot of this would also be helped by getting the implementer meetings 
going again. We could talk through these concerns. I'm convinced most of 
the confusion around 1.8.7 could have been avoided with more communication.

- Charlie