From: mathew Date: 2011-01-22T03:06:56+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:34760] Re: [Ruby 1.8-Feature#4239] Let's begin a talk for "1.8.8" -- How's needed for surviving 1.8? On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 03:30, Zeno Davatz wrote: > Consistency should have been between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9. That is why I > fight for a Ruby 1.8.8 because I want to bridge the inconsistent gap (the > crevasse) between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9. The thing you seem to be missing is that *consistency should only go one way*. Ideally, any 1.8.x Ruby program would work in Ruby 1.9.x. However, it is absolutely not the case that any 1.9.x program should work in 1.8.x. Otherwise 1.9 would just be another 1.8. It was never intended to be that; it was intended to be a superset of 1.8, with major new functionality. If you want any of the new functionality in Ruby 1.9, *move to 1.9*. If you give examples of things that work in vanilla 1.8.x and break in 1.9.x, I think people will be sympathetic and try to find fixes. If you demand the reverse, that new features be added to 1.8.x, I think you'll continue to be on your own. Moving new functionality from 1.9 to 1.8.8 would be absolutely the wrong thing for Matz to do, precisely because it would break existing 1.8 programs, the way your programs have apparently been broken when you tried to move them to 1.9. But having said that... > All of the Apps we wrote on Ruby 1.8. have to be rewritten for Ruby 1.9 > - ALL of them! So obviously you only care about consistency within one > major release. ...I've got to say, if you've really had to rewrite everything to get it to run on 1.9, you must be doing something seriously wrong. The only problems I've hit have been caused by file encodings, and most of them were fixed by declaring utf-8 at the top of the code. mathew --