From: Brian Candler Date: 2011-07-24T04:59:11+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:38427] [Backport87 - Feature #4996] About 1.8.7 EOL Issue #4996 has been updated by Brian Candler. I'm a lone voice in the wilderness, but when ruby 1.8 is gone, I'm gone. Ruby won't miss me, but I'll miss Ruby. I've been around since 1.6.8. As far as I know, ruby 1.9's Encoding system is *still* lacking any official documentation. I reversed-engineered and documented about 200 behaviours, by which point it was abundantly clear to me that I cannot bear to use it (and yet with 1.9 it cannot be avoided). Surely computing does not need to be so difficult! I still hold out hope that Rite, being a trimmed-down language, will have well-defined semantics. I also note that the Ruby Specification project picked 1.8.7 as its base. Has that project been abandoned? Are all ruby implementations only going to have the MRI source code as the language reference going forward? ---------------------------------------- Feature #4996: About 1.8.7 EOL http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/4996 Author: Shyouhei Urabe Status: Open Priority: Normal Assignee: Category: core Target version: No, not now. Don't worry. But we have to start talking about this topic: when and how 1.8.7 should die. "You should really use 1.9". I have said this again and again and now repeat it once more. As we're about to release 1.9.3 I can't but say it is, totally wonderful. Rich features. Faster execution. Rubygems integrated. Rails works perfectly. I've been using 1.9 for years and now I can't go back to the days without it. So why there's still 1.8.7? It's also clear: for system admins. So far 1.8.7 has been adopted widely because it was a state of art ruby implementation of the day it was released. Even after you stop writing software for something, it needs bugfixes and maintenance releases. For ruby 1.8.7 , that's what I'd been offering for these three years. Now... I know many of you're still developing your software against 1.8.7 in spite of its dead-endedness. Sooner or later the whole Ruby community will move towards 1.9 and those 1.8.7-based systems are expected to become unmaintained. I don't like the situation. I want you and your system to be 1.9 ready. So to encourage your moving towards 1.9, I think I should define 1.8.7's end-of-life to be at some point in the future. I guess you're not moving to 1.9 because 1.8 is (or at least seems to be) maintained. Let's stop it. We will no longer touch 1.8.7 in any way once after the EOL. right? My current timeline (to be rescheduled) is: - Normal maintenance (as it is today): provided until June 2012, - Security fixes: provided until June 2013. Give us your opinioms. -- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org