From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2008-08-06T09:59:14+09:00
Subject: Re: State of Ruby 1.8.6?

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Alex Fenton <alex@deleteme.pressure.to> wrote:

> Ruby 1.8.7 is a dead-end experimental release and I wouldn't waste your time
> with it. For some reason the core ruby development team see the "stable" 1.8
> branch as the perfect place to tinker around with cute new features and
> needless changes to the underlying extension API. As a result 1.8.7 (and
> possibly later versions of 1.8.6?) don't only break certain Rails versions
> but also any library that uses certain SWIG features to generate extension
> code.

Though I might put it more humble, I couldn't agree more.  I wish that
1.8.7 was actually just a special branch of 1.8 that could be checked
out of svn, rather than an official release.  I need to work around my
package managers to keep things stable by running 1.8.6, and for my
1.9 enabled work, I need to really run Ruby 1.9 to check if things are
working properly, so 1.8.7 does nothing to help me.

It's a neat experiment, but maintenance and purity wise, I hate it.

-greg