On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:15 AM, David Thompson
<dthomp...@waisman.wisc.edu> wrote:
>
>> basically anyone attempting to do anything reasonable with ruby on RHEL 5.x
>> (or any of the free repackaged distributions of RHEL 5.x) knows that 1.8.5
>> version is just short of useless and has implemented other fixes.
>
> Some comments on this thread, and current software development trends
> in general.
>
> Craig, the version of ruby that ships with RHEL 5 was good enough for
> many things, including dashboard <= 1.1. So, while it may have
> problems and limitations, I think you overstate things to say it is
> "just short of useless."
>
> Also, "long in the tooth" is subjective; RHEL 5 (and the derivative
> works) are currently supported distributions with significant
> installed user bases. Many environments, for many different reasons,
> have decided that EL is the best choice for them. It's important to
> respect those decisions. As a system administrator, I see people
> ignore compatibility with the EL distros regularly, and it's
> unfortunate that many people wave their hands with phrases like 'long
> in the tooth,' 'next to useless,' or 'any modern linux
> distribution' (from another project I was asked to install recently),
> which don't mesh well with the realities of significant parts of the
> installed linux base.
>
> In this case, as was pointed out, there are fairly simple ways to get
> ruby >1.8.5 onto an EL 5 system. But when someone writes an app
> against the lastest and greatest libgtk and friends, and uses the most
> recent versions of everything because that's what's available on their
> latest ubuntu release, it simply cuts them off from many potential
> users, for perhaps very little developer gain. Developers should
> consider carefully the run-time requirements vs. the target audience
> as part of the development process.
>
> I agree with Ramin that a different numbering scheme for ruby versions
> would have made more sense. A tiny version change (e.g. 1.8.5 to
> 1.8.7) would be understood in many release contexts to contain bug-
> fixes only and introduce no higher-level incompatibilities (a very
> broad simplification, but still true). Version numbers mean something
> very different to the ruby development team than they do to many other
> knowledgeable people.
>
> All that being said, if the dashboard development folks have decided
> that 1.8.7 is needed, then 1.8.7 it is. Perhaps pointers to suitable
> ruby builds could be included in the release notes (or on the download
> page, etc., etc.) as an aid to those who will need to upgrade.
It's not just Dashboard that decided not to support older versions of
Ruby, Rails (the framework Dashboard uses) doesn't support older
version of Ruby.
http://rubyonrails.org/download
We recommend Ruby 1.8.7 or Ruby 1.9.2 for use with Rails. Ruby
1.8.6 and earlier are not supported, neither is version 1.9.1.
While it's true this statement applies explicitly to Rails 3.x rather
than Rails 2.3.x (which Dashboard is still based on), there is nowhere
we could find that explicitly says that Rails 2.3.x *supports* Ruby
1.8.5, so there's no guarantee that security fixes (of which there
were a few applied recently) will support Ruby 1.8.5.
It's probably a good idea to briefly mention a few ways (numerous were
mentioned in this thread) to get newer Rubies in the Dashboard manual
(http://docs.puppetlabs.com/dashboard/manual/1.2/bootstrapping.html#installing-dependencies).
I've included our excellent documentation writer on this thread.
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