On Dec 25, 2007, at 13:35 PM, Dave Thomas wrote:
> On Dec 25, 2007, at 1:31 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> Yeah ... I'm with you on this one, having just discovered that two  
>> gems,
>> rcov and hpricot, need to be updated to work with 1.9 anyhow. Should
>> there be some kind of "master list" of the "commonly used gems" that
>> need updating so they'll work with either 1.8 or 1.9? So far I have
>
> My experience is that a whole bunch of gems are broken. Some fail  
> explicitly, some just don't work properly.
>
> I think this is bad PR just waiting to happen.
>
> So, a suggestion.
>
> From now on, require that gems declare the version(s) of Ruby they  
> run with. Have this default to 1.8 if not specified. Then have  
> require() warn if loading a gem under 1.9 that doesn't explicitly  
> say it runs on 1.9.

There is a required_ruby_version attribute in Gem::Specification.   
(It's been there for some time.)  By default it is '> 0'.