From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2009-07-02T18:58:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Best OS packages for Ruby?

2009/7/2 Fabian Streitel <karottenreibe@googlemail.com>:
>> I think people would be asking for a deprecation period
>
> I never said you shouldn't do that. I just said you shouldn't go
> around complaining about how your Ruby 1.0 script isn't gonna
> work with 1.9 (*warning, exaggerated statement*).
> Deprecation periods are of course good. But I just don't see why
> people keep nagging about how 1.8.7 is sooo bad when mostly all
> it did was add new features.

These features alone are a problem. If you write your shiny new script
on ruby 1.8.7 and give it to somebody with ruby 1.8.6 then it's very
likely it won't work unless you were very careful and did throughout
testing on earlier rubies.

1.8.7 adds a bunch of simple and useful utility functions which you ca
easily emulate (an which you have most likely written in one form or
another for your earlier code) but there is no warning in the docs or
a runtime compatibility check or something.

So instead of writing the utility functions as you did in 1.8.6 you
will have to write a check that the method you want is already
present, and only after you find out about the additions. Not exactly
an improvement.

>
>> and not suddenly in a swift move that can sometimes
>> to a large company be really cost-ineffective.
>
> If you sell a product that's based on Ruby, where's the problem
> of shipping it with the ruby version it was developed with? At least
> if your company is large. Ruby really isn't that
> big a package? There are even tools that do this for you, if I
> remember correctly (at least for Win32 I think).
>
> Sure that statement may be true for big stuff like Java and its standard
> library, but the 5 Megs of Ruby code you'd have to package up can't
> be that much a burdon, can they?
>

It may be the standard way on Windows or OS X but on Linux/UNIX you
send the script and expect it to tun on any system with reasonably
recent interpreter of your favourite language. And even on Windows it
may be handy to send a few kilobytes of script instead of a few
megabytes of interpreter+script package.

The stuff about 1.8.7 breaking old stuff probably arose from the
changelog being somewhat hard to read and ruby 1.8.7 reporting some
arcane errors related to new features in some cases that were already
broken on 1.8.6. Many people were probably misled by these errors and
thought that the code broke because of the new features while it was
already broken. Due to the dynamic nature of ruby it can easily happen
that some state that was never reached before would by chance occur
just after upgrade to 1.8.7.

It would be much nicer if the new features were released separately as
a package that could be installed on top of both 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 for
people to test and enjoy when they are interested without the need for
the stuff to be present at all times. Unfortunately it was not done
that way so you get all or nothing.


Thanks

Michal