From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2009-02-12T10:28:46+09:00
Subject: Re: If you are unhappy with the direction of Ruby 1.8.7+, respond

Pit Capitain wrote:

> AFAIK 1.8.7 introduced a method that Rails was using. This could have
> happened in previous Ruby upgrades as well. I don't see why this is
> something special with 1.8.7.


That's the point: library authors should be able to write against a 
'stable' version of the language, without fearing that a Ruby branch 
maintainer is going to happen to fancy to add a clashing method.

As a library author, it's fair to ask me to track pre-release versions 
of 1.9, if I want to ensure timely compatibility with that. But it's not 
reasonable to ask me to track changes on a 'stable' branch.


> As for the C extensions: do you have more information about what was
> changed in the Ruby internals that lead to those problems?

http://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2034216&group_id=1645&atid=101645

>> But this misses the main point - that there is no assurance that code
>> developed using 1.8.7 (or 1.8.8) will run on 1.8.6.
> 
> Again, this is nothing special with the 1.8.7 release. It has been
> like this since I'm using Ruby, which is since 2000. The important
> point is that (most) 1.8.6 code still runs on 1.8.7.

A folly repeated is not a folly reduced. I've suffered from this before 
1.8.5 -> 1.8.6, and been critical of it before.

I guess that 1.8.7 has just happened to make the silliness of adding a 
random pot-pourri of features more apparent to more people.

alex