dear fred,
i understand this is the dev mailing list and politeness does not supersede
correctness given the topical nature of this mailing list.
i am the last one to be pedantic, but serge *did* qualify his statement with a
“should” (i.e. expectation), meaning it was not absolute.
let us not be too strong with our correctness and trample the spirit of our
already-scarce contributors, lest we want them to defect to our snooty
fink-derived alcohol competitor.
ta ta’
Thanks,
Gagan
P.S/ valerio, you know what’s coming next time you post, so be ready.
-i didn’t want to scare you off by saying it earlier this week, because
i was already worried i scared you off the first time!
> On Mar 23, 2024, at 6:59 PM, Fred Wright <f...@fwright.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 17 Mar 2024, Sergio Had wrote:
>
>> I have no idea what is going on with archaic versions, but Ruby 3.1+ through
>> ruby-devel (3.4) should work on every system.
>
> Please stop posting falsehoods. Ruby 3.1-3.3 most certainly do *not* work on
> every system (yet), and I posted a list of the failing cases in another
> thread where you were a participant. I haven't looked at 3.4.
>
>> They are, and everything relevant is rb33-* etc. Unversioned one which use
>> rb18 should re updated or removed: we have no reason to keep Ruby versions
>> prior to 3.0, since 3.0 works on Tiger, and 3.1+ work on Leopard through
>> Sonoma. That also includes PowerPC systems.
>
> Again, false.
>
> For at least the past few years, no version of Ruby has worked on all systems
> until I personally fixed it, and I haven't had a chance to fix anything later
> than 3.0 yet. And contrary to popular belief, Ruby 3.0 isn't (quite) EOL yet.
>
> As far as having multiple versions goes, Ruby is just like many other things,
> where having multiple versions is useful for (at least):
>
> 1) Testing code against multiple versions.
>
> 2) Using a textbook that is based on a particular version.
>
> 3) Avoiding brokenness in one or more versions.
>
> No too long ago, the instructions for building the RaspberryPi docs stated
> that asciidoctor needed to be run with Ruby 2.7 because it didn't work
> properly with 3.0 (at least for their files). While that no longer seems to
> be the case, it does serve to illustrate that newer isn't always better, and
> that it's best to give users a choice as to what version to use, rather than
> inflicting someone else's notion of the one true best version on them.
>
> On Sat, 16 Mar 2024, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>
>> I also think that the `ruby` port needs to be renamed to `ruby18` and `port
>> install ruby` should *either* fail (like `port install python` or `port
>> install python3` does) or it should install the latest stable version
>> (updated on Christmas Day every year).
>
> Agreed. Presumably this came about because having multiple versions wasn't
> initially anticipated. It's unfortunate that (unlike some other packaging
> systems) MacPorts doesn't have a way to directly make multiple versions of
> something available without resorting to the kludge of building the version
> number into the name.
>
> Fred Wright
