From: James Coglan <jcoglan@...>
Date: 2009-02-12T08:23:19+09:00
Subject: Re: If you are unhappy with the direction of Ruby 1.8.7+, respond

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2009/2/11 Pit Capitain <pit.capitain@gmail.com>

> 2009/2/11 Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@gmail.com>:
> > Ruby 1.8.7 is NOT compatible with Ruby 1.8.6.
>
> I've seen many people claiming this, and they might be right of
> course, but no one has shown any examples yet. If it is so hard to
> find 1.8.6 code that doesn't work with 1.8.7, the backward
> compatibility of 1.8.7 seems to be pretty good.



Requires hoe, ZenTest and 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 installed using multiruby:

git clone git://github.com/jcoglan/packr.git packr
cd packr
git co -b 3.1 origin/3.1
git co 4cc307
rake multi

This is not using any new 1.8.7 features, it's using 1.8.6 behaviour that
broke. Under 1.8.6, hashes had keys inserted in the order in which they
appear in the source, which is not true of 1.8.7. Granted, this ordering was
never explicitly intended for 1.8.x, but still it introduced major bugs in
my code. PackR still has a bug I'm unable to fix on 1.8.7, though thankfully
it's not a show-stopper, it's a nice-to-have 'bonus feature' that doesn't
work.

I for one do not want to pull updates to ruby1.8 from my package manager and
have even more of my code break, esp. as I maintain various libraries and
it's hell having to explain to people that my code is broken because their
package manager is not fine-grained enough and they need to install stuff
from source. I expect stuff to not be 100% on 1.9, but my experience so far
is that 1.9 has caused me fewer and more easily fixable bugs than 1.8.7.

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