From: Charles Oliver Nutter Date: 2009-02-12T05:15:53+09:00 Subject: Re: If you are unhappy with the direction of Ruby 1.8.7+, respond I am not happy. Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.8.8 are attempts to bridge the gap between 1.8.6 and 1.9, but they change the 1.8 line in much more drastic ways that is warranted by a minor version number change. That's one point against them. A similar approach in the Python community has led to 2.6, 2.7 releases stepping toward 3.0, but those are major release version number changes and they're only doing them if the community demands them. In this case, 1.8.7 and 1.8.8 are moving forward whether the community wants them or not. Another point against. Minor version releases should certainly not break things except as needed to fix bugs. Ruby 1.8.7 did this initially. They should not add entirely new APIs incompatible with other minor releases. They should not add new syntax incompatible with other minor releases. Ruby 1.8.7 does the former, and 1.8.8 syntax backports will do the latter. More points against. I still feel like Ruby 1.9 should have been 2.0. Then 1.8.7 could have been 1.9, 1.8.8 could be 1.10, and so on, and people depending on "Ruby 1.8" to behave like "Ruby 1.8" would not be forced to upgrade. In general, I don't have any doubt that 1.8.7 and 1.8.8 would be fine standalone releases, but making them be minor version number changes essentially forces everyone to upgrade eventually, whether they want to or not, since Ruby distributors generally don't expect a 0.0.x release to be filled with incompatible changes or additions. Ubuntu, for example, now installs 1.8.7 by default, so Ubuntu users are now much more likely to write code that doesn't work on 1.8.6. And note also that Ruby core has only a few resources to maintain Ruby versions...which means the existence of 1.8.7 and plans for 1.8.8 will eventually force 1.8.6 to be abandoned like 1.8.5 and 1.8.4. How would you feel about 1.8.6 being EOLed because of 1.8.7 and 1.8.8 taking up resources? - Charlie