From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2011-01-22T02:00:21+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:34755] Re: [Ruby 1.8-Feature#4239] Let's begin a talk for "1.8.8" -- How's needed for surviving 1.8?

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Zeno Davatz <redmine@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> Issue #4239 has been updated by Zeno Davatz.
> Can you be a bit more specific please or can you point me to a thread I should read. Ruby versioning seems one big book of secrets it seems.

This was stated earlier in this thread ([ruby-core:34527]). In the
entire time that I've been using Ruby where 1.9 has been discussed,
it's always been discussed as "making incompatible changes so that the
transition to 2.0 is cleaner."

> Paradigm: does that stand for Top-Down-Design? Also what is the difference between .patch an -ppatch?

It's a word that I'm using in this sense to mean "larger than a Major
version". The pattern is:

  1.9.2-p302

It's Major 1.9 (or Paradigm 1, Major 9), minor 2, patch 302. I should
have done my example as:

  P'.'M'.'m'-p'p

to make it clear that the first p in ppatch was a literal.

I would suggest that you stop thinking that 1.9 is a minor version of
Ruby v1. It's not and *never has been*. It's a new major version with
planned incompatibilities. There are some unplanned incompatibilities,
but those are fixing real errors. This is like suggesting that Mac OS
X 10.5 was a minor version; it was not, in fact. Other versions are
even more inscrutable (HP-UX, anyone?)

There may be a case for Ruby 1.8.8 (I'm not convinced), but increased
compatibility between 1.8 and 1.9 is not such a case. Arguing that
1.9.2 is fundamentally broken because it provides a guarantee of
failure for certain cases that are statistically unlikely (but
virtually certain to happen in large enough cases) won't get you very
far.

In sum: 1.9 is a major version release of Ruby with promised
incompatibilities and it has a few that weren't promised but turn out
to be good ideas in practice despite some hardships that folks are
facing because of unsupported third-party libraries.

-a
-- 
Austin Ziegler � halostatue@gmail.com � austin@halostatue.ca
http://www.halostatue.ca/ � http://twitter.com/halostatue