[gentoo-dev] Ruby: depreciating 1.6.8 in favour of 1.8.0

[Tom Payne <twp@gentoo.org>]

The new stable version of Ruby, 1.8.0, was released a few days ago.

I would like to update all of dev-ruby to use 1.8.0, and depreciate 1.6.8
completely. Reasons for depreciating 1.6.8 are:

1) AIUI 1.6.8 is now dead and will not be maintained.

2) There are a number of (small) language changes that mean that will cause
some 1.6.8 to break under 1.8.0. This means that maintaining 1.6.8 packages
alongside 1.8.0 packages will be problematic.

3) 1.8.0 now includes a number of packages that were previously distributed
separately (e.g. rexml, syck, optparse, webrick, racc, strscan, eruby,
runit, xmlrpc).  Creating virtuals for all of these packages so that users
have the option of 1.6.8 or 1.8.0 would be a nightmare, especially since
portage does not officially support versioned virtuals.

Switching to 1.8.0 will also have downsides:

1) Forcing 1.6.8 users to upgrade may break their code.

2) Older 1.6.8 packages will no longer be supported.

Comments? Complaints?

Unless there is a huge cry of "keep 1.6.8!" I will being the migration on
Mon 18 Aug.

Cheers,

Tom

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