From: "David A. Black" Date: 2009-02-13T00:55:37+09:00 Subject: Re: If you are unhappy with the direction of Ruby 1.8.7+, respond On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Stefan Lang wrote: > 2009/2/11 James Gray : >> On Feb 11, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Pit Capitain wrote: >> >>> 2009/2/11 Rick DeNatale : >>>> >>>> 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. >> >> This is trivial to prove. This code: >> >> Object.new.tap { |o| p o } >> >> runs on 1.8.7 and not 1.8.6. > > 1.8.x releases always introduced new methods. > If Ruby releases were done how the mob here wants > them, we wouldn't have a single new method since > 1.8.0 was released in 2003. There's no mob. I wish people would stop using that word in this thread. These are, to a large extent, friends of mine, and friends of the core team members, discussing an exceptionally important Ruby issue with ardency but with collegiality. Much, much more has been said about the issues involved in the recent version policy than that it's bad to introduce any new methods in teeny versions (and that, as far as I can see, has *not* been said). My main problem with it is that, while I understand the idea of 1.8.7 and 1.8.8 as stepping stones to 1.9.1, I don't think we need any stepping stones. I've been learning 1.9 pretty intensely over the past year, and I have never felt the need to have a 1.8 version that had 1.9 features. 1.9 has kept me quite busy. I also love 1.8.6, and while I think a lot of 1.9 features are great, I've never felt like I can't go another day (week, month, whatever) without them. So the whole backporting thing has been a puzzle to me. I think, in any case, that there's no one thing (1.8.7 not running 1.8.6 code; 1.8.x ceasing to mean what a.b.x has generally meant in the past; 1.8.>6 leading to more, rather than less, trepidation about moving to 1.9; the issues with non-MRI implementations that Charlie and Evan have talked about, etc.) responsible for the misgivings. It's a kind of perfect storm of all these things. I don't see any long-term way out of it except to focus on the move to 1.9.1. I don't mean that as a repudiation of anyone's work. It's my assessment of where things stand, however they got there. David -- David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC Ruby/Rails consulting & training: http://www.rubypal.com Coming in 2009: The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://manning.com/black2) http://www.wishsight.com => Independent, social wishlist management!