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On 31 Jan 2005, at 18:21, Francis Hwang wrote:

> On Jan 31, 2005, at 7:37 PM, James Britt wrote:
>
>> I can understand that, though for many Rubyists 1.8.2 has a been a 
>> long time coming, and people have been working and playing with 1.7 , 
>> 1.8.x, and previews of 1.8.2  prior to the final release.  There is a 
>> good chance that new features or fixes are in 1.8 precisely because 
>> of this, and the people pushing for these changes tend to be the same 
>> ones writing a good many applications.
>
> But "been a long time coming" is not the same thing as "has been 
> released for some time." 1.8.2 has only been out for about one month, 
> so if you're a fairly conservative adopter, it's reasonable to expect 
> that you might still be back at the last stable version.
>
> Though now, for some reason, I forget: When was the last stable 
> version before 1.8.2? Was this 1.8.0? I can't find this online.

1.8.1

>> I'd be interested in some rough figures, as my limited impression is 
>> that getting and installing Ruby is dead simple, so the main barriers 
>> would be personal choice or company policy, and that most Rubyists 
>> exercise the option to update when there is a new stable version.
>
> What about compatibility with previous versions in the std lib? I 
> wrote a Ruby-driven e-commerce site in 2002, using Ruby 1.6, and those 
> versions of Marshal and Eruby. When the host upgraded to 1.8.2, the 
> site fell down like a ton of bricks, because those libraries were 
> massively backwards incompatible. Luckily, I was available to fix it 
> posthaste, but if I had been, say, on vacation, or no longer working 
> with that company, they would have been screwed.

Marshal format has always been tied to Ruby version, but care has been 
taken to make it as compatible as possible.  Unfortunately, a good 
alternative format for persisting data didn't exist for very long in 
the 1.6 series.

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain / segment7.net - http://segment7.net
FEC2 57F1 D465 EB15 5D6E  7C11 332A 551C 796C 9F04

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