On 29/01/14 at 22:02 +0100, Francesco Poli wrote: > On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:47:27 -0300 Antonio Terceiro wrote: > > > On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:49:17PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote: > > > On Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:28:43 -0300 Antonio Terceiro wrote: > [...] > > > > one bit I forgot: we also decided that we won't support more than one > > > > version in stable releases, so the 'default' version is actually the > > > > unique one. > > > > > > I am not too happy to hear that: as far as I know, Debian gives more > > > choice to users for other languages (such as Python, AWK, all GCC > > > languages, ...). > > > I hope this situation will improve in the future. I think that > > > supporting at least a couple of major versions (a more mature one, used > > > as default interpreter, and a more recent bleeding edge one) would be > > > great. > > > > Well, choices need people to support them. > > That's true. > > > With 2 Ruby versions security > > problems often need 6 different uploads¹ that have to be built and > > tested, and I prefer to spend only half that time and spend the other > > half doing other things in Debian. :) > > > > ¹ 2 versions x 3 suites (unstable, stable, oldstable) > > Fair enough, but, still, it would be great to have two supported major > versions: it would give people more time to port libraries and > applications to a newer Ruby interpreter, while still relying on the > more mature one... > > Anyway, just to be clear: I fully understand your reasoning and I agree > that, without more Ruby maintainers, it makes sense to reduce the > number of supported major versions.
Another important point IMHO is that in the past (2005-2011?), there was a split inside the ruby community about the real "stable" version: the upstream devs felt it was the 1.9 branch, while everybody was still using 1.8. This is similar to the situation of Python a couple of years ago. But now, this seems to be resolved, and everybody has moved to 2.X, with more gradual improvements and less incompatibility between new upstream releases. So we are much more in a perl5-ish situation, and it doesn't make much sense anymore to support several upstream branches in our stable releases. Probably the major lesson to learn about this, too, is that splitting the community around programming languages into branches (ruby 1.8/1.9, perl 5/6, python 2.X/3.X) is harmful and extremely costly. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
