Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In message "Re: [ruby-core:17428] Re: 1.8 release management"
>     on Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:33:07 +0900, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb / cesmail.net> writes:
> 
> |As I understand it, maintenance has been dropped for 1.8.5. I doubt if 
> |that has a serious impact except for those running servers on old Linux 
> |distros that shipped with 1.8.5. They'll clearly have to upgrade to 1.8.6.
> 
> Right.  Now 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 are under stable maintenance.  1.8.8 (to
> be) is maintained as 1.8 head.  The basic principle is having a head
> and two maintenance versions.

Well ... after I did a little digging and discovered that it appears Red 
Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is still using Ruby 1.8.5, I've come to question 
my assumption that the majority of Ruby users were on 1.8.6. If you or 
anyone else in the Ruby community has any influence inside the Red Hat 
corporate hierarchy, I'd hope that some kind of assistance could be 
provided to either get the 1.8.6 version into RHEL 5, or to provide a 
fixed 1.8.5. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a big deal.

Outside of the "Ruby community", this may represent a business 
opportunity for someone talented and enterprising. :)

> We cannot have the major improvement in 1.9 (YARV performance and
> M17N) in 1.8 anyway.  The purpose of backporting is reducing migration
> cost to 1.9.  We have to ask Akinori for more detail.

As you probably recall, I'm a performance engineer (non-Ruby-related) 
for a living. But even so, the number one priority for a release is 
usually security, number two is usually lack of bugs. Performance is no 
greater than number three, and is quite possibly lower. So my 
preference, as a performance engineer, is to see 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 secure 
and stable, and focus my personal energies on using 1.9 wherever 
possible for the performance gains, rather than 1.8.7 for the backported 
syntax and semantics without the performance gains.