On 06/03/11 at 11:22 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le dimanche 06 mars 2011 à 10:58 +0100, Lucas Nussbaum a écrit : > > > You are just going to empower users to shoot themselves in the foot. > > > > What if users want the ability to shoot themselves in the foot? > > Currently you’re the one holding the weapon. > > > Also, you seem to assume that Ruby 1.9 is completely broken. That's not > > true. A lot of things still work after switching from 1.8 to 1.9. > > I don’t know whether Ruby 1.9 is broken or not. What I’m sure of, is > that with your proposed dependency scheme, you will not be able to > ensure dependencies will be installed for Ruby 1.9. Which means changing > the Ruby version with alternatives would just break user systems. > > If users want Ruby 1.9, serve them Ruby 1.9 and get rid of the > applications not supporting it (or use explicit versions for them). But > don’t serve them a system that is half-compatible with Ruby 1.9 and not > up to the stability expectations of a Debian system. > > If you choose to support several Ruby interpreters through alternatives, > you have to specify the interface that /usr/bin/ruby provides, just like > for Java. This means settling on the lowest common denominator of what > these interpreters can provide - and this is *completely opposite* to > the users’ request, since they want to benefit from the improvements in > Ruby 1.9.
Note that, for applications written in Ruby and packaged in Debian, we will make sure that they work no matter what /usr/bin/ruby points to (if necessary, by forcing the shebang to ruby1.8, and installing the correct dependencies). What might break is software manually installed by users. I don't see how that situation is different from the Java one. > > Anyway. We are early in the wheezy release cycle. If switching ruby > > implementations using alternatives turns out to be a bad idea, we can > > switch back to the former approach at some point. And we will arguments > > to reply to users who currently want it. > > Do you really need to break hundreds of user systems just to make a > handful of whiners happy? I am under the impression that it's not "a handful of whiners", but that the consensus in the Ruby community is that we should switch to alternatives. - Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110306104001.ga8...@xanadu.blop.info
