From: Thomas Fini Hansen <beast@...>
Date: 2005-02-05T19:56:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Is compatibility important for us?

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 10:09:49AM +0900, Dick Davies wrote:
> * James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com> [0237 00:37]:
> 
> to OP: I feel your pain (netbsd didn't have 1.8 until very
> recently), but the latest 1.8 really is a big change from 1.6.
> It saves a lot of bother (for the developer and the users) to
> have the extra libraries available.
> 
> And it's really not a lot of work to build from source, only takes
> about 15 minutes. You can play with that while nagging your distro
> maintainer to upgrade :)

It might not be that simple. I would love to get 1.8 on our production
server (opens the door to rails), but whenever I've tried the
backports, the combination of new Ruby, mod_ruby and old (ie, stable)
Apache has failed horribly (the Apache process just hangs on files
that use Ruby). I've even tried compiling from the Debian source
package, without luck (I doubt that I would have more luck with the
original source). 

On a test server it works marvellously using Apache 2 (though, I had to
compile Ruby and mod_ruby from the Debian sources for some reason),
but then PHP is a problem, which is a nogo as we got rather a lot of
PHP running on the production server. 

(Aside: now there's a sad tale, PHP holding back Ruby. Apparently PHP,
in contrast to mod_ruby, mod_perl and mod_python, has serious problems
with threading in the new Apache.. But I digress.)

All these interdependencies means that we're still stuck on 1.6 on the
production server. 

Of course I understand why people code for 1.8, I'd do the same if
offered the chance. But do bear in mind that we can't all upgrade to
the latest and greatest all the time, so if backwards compatibility
can be attained with a bit of effort, it would be much appreciated.

-- 
Thomas
beast@system-tnt.dk