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

[R0b0t1 <r030t1@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

That's very insightful. However, I think developers originally started
requesting versions with such specificity because breaking changes,
even minor ones, were made with such consistency. At a certain point
this does simply spill over into maintainer preference but package
maintainers may be following the lead of the language developers.

E.g. most Python packages provide extremely stable interfaces.

Cheers,
     R0b0t1.