From: Jordon Bedwell <jordon@...>
Date: 2009-07-02T05:21:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Best OS packages for Ruby?

I think people would be asking for a deprecation period, a key part of
evolution if you ever took science.  Evolution is not defined by a "sudden"
change but a "period of change over time" which means that there is some
form of backwards compatibility in evolution for some minor period of time,
to give people the ability to grant new features while moving old features
to new features without suddenly breaking their entire application all at
once.  While yes, there are ways to work around the things they change,
people want the ability to bring those changes to their own API's and
applications over time and not suddenly in a swift move that can sometimes
to a large company be really cost-ineffective.  Take a look at MySQL, they
break features every milestone most of the time, but they still maintain a
period of deprecation, and sometimes even full on backwards compatibility
(AKA: OldPasswords) and PHP is a good example too, deprecated features that
were removed piece by piece overtime and then lead to the final removal in
the next major milestone.

-----Original Message-----
From: Fabian Streitel [mailto:karottenreibe@googlemail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 2:47 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Best OS packages for Ruby?

>
> Perhaps.  But if you are running 1.8.7, and writing code for general
> distribution, is there not a real chance you will end up with code that
only
> works with 1.8.7?


That's exactly why the Java guys have the worst API ever conceived
(at least as far as I know).
If everyone's always whining about "No you can't take that feature out"
or "No don't change that behaviour" because it'll break some legacy
code then real progress is never gonna happen.

Like anything in IT, programming languages and their libraries have to
evolve or they'll just become a big heap of unusable deprecations.

And what comes with this is the responsibility of the programmer to keep
his code up-to-date. Or to keep the Ruby version the same for all eternity.
Whichever one prefers...

Also, I had the experience that the 2 or 3 features of 1.8.7 you use, which
are not present in 1.8.6 are fairly easily emulated, e.g. Array#group_by
and fellows.

(Just my two cents ;-)

Greetz,
k