Re: [gentoo-user] Ruby - 3 versions - seriously????

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 09/04/2017 01:07 PM, R0b0t1 wrote:
> 
> For almost all languages but Ruby (and Perl) you can take code written
> against one minor version and compile it in the next minor version.


This isn't a language issue with Ruby, it's a culture/package-management
one. For a long time, it's been easy to bundle dependencies in Ruby. The
result is a culture of saying "I need the version of ruby-foo that was
released on my birthday that one time mercury was in retrograde, and
also I'd like the version number to have a seven in it somewhere because
that's my daughter's age." When two package authors come up with two
different requirements like that, you end up needing *two* versions of
ruby-foo installed.

Even if both packages could happily use the same, latest version of
ruby-foo -- you get what upstream says in most cases. And what upstream
says is usually crap, because they bundle everything and will never
notice annoying incompatibilities like end-users do.