At Mon, 4 Aug 2003 18:02:52 +0300, Dmitry Borodaenko wrote: > > As rightfully pointed out by Fumitoshi UKAI, this discussion belongs to > the wider audience of debian-devel, especially since Ruby 1.8.0 was > released today. > > NB: some points raised here can be of interest not only to Ruby > developers, but also to developers from other scripting languages. > Generic questions are: > > Is there or shouldn't there be policy or guidelines on major version > transition for scripting languages?
Currently, there are no such policy or guidelines. There are policies for each specific languages such as perl, python, java, emacsen, however, it seems that they have somewhat different approaches. I think it is impossible or very difficult to make general policy. Anyway, it would be very helpful to make a guideline that suggests the answers for the following questions. > What considerations should be taken into account when deciding whether > to keep several different major language versions co-installable? > > Where should libraries written in a scripting language go? (That one is > my pet question: FHS seems to point to /usr/share/, while in Debian, > most languages use /usr/lib/, and I have arguments against both :) > > Ruby-specific question is, of course, how do we deal with Ruby 1.8 > transition? Since ruby 1.8.0 was released recently, ruby developers will go to ruby 1.8.x, so that we, ruby maintenance team (akira, tagoh, ukai), are discussing about how to deal with Ruby 1.8 transition and trying to make debian ruby policy soon. For now, ruby package provides /usr/bin/ruby of ruby 1.6.x, and ruby1.8 package provides /usr/bin/ruby1.8 of ruby 1.8.x. Someone want to use /usr/bin/ruby of ruby 1.8.x, so we're considering to use alternatives for /usr/bin/ruby to choice either ruby1.6, ruby1.8 (or any other version of ruby in future). I wonder we should rename ruby package to ruby1.6 package and ruby package for meta package for default version of ruby now. It requires package renaming which is somehow troublesome, so I suspect it's worth to do it. Anyway, I don't think we'll change ruby1.8 to ruby in the future, and ruby becomes meta package for default version of ruby after ruby 1.6.x is removed from unstable. The default include paths of each ruby version are as follows: % ruby -e 'puts $:' /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.6 /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.6/i386-linux /usr/local/lib/site_ruby /usr/lib/ruby/1.6 /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/i386-linux
