My reply seems to have dropped off.  Trying again...

On 10/12/05, Ara.T.Howard <Ara.T.Howard / noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the widespread adoption of ruby in my
> lab is the fact what we've standardized on redhat enterprise for all of our
> boxen.  it ships with 1.6.8.  this is a sorry state of affairs and i wonder
> why it should be so.  the perl and python versions are resonable, thought not
> cutting edge - any rational behind this?  anyone know how to go about changing
> it?

I am also stuck with RHEL for Linux at the office, mostly because we
use ClearCase.  I don't have a rationale for the Ruby shortcoming, but
I feel your pain.

> on a related note - anyone know of a compatability layer to bridge 1.6.8 to
> 1.8.x for cgi libs specifically?  does the/a shim do this - the only one i have
> doesn't seem too...  the cgi interface changed enough between 1.6.x and 1.8.x
> to render useless any cgi code written for the former, for example:
>
>    jib:~/eg/ruby > cat a.rb
>    require 'cgi'
>    cgi = CGI::new
>    p cgi['k']
>
>    jib:~/eg/ruby > echo k=v|ruby168 a.rb
>    ["v"]
>
>    jib:~/eg/ruby > echo k=v|ruby182 a.rb
>    "v"
>
> i can bridge it myself using
>
>    class CGI
>      alias_method '__idx__', '[]'
>      def [] k
>        [ __idx__(k) ].flatten.first
>      end
>    end
>
> but then there is multipart form uploads/tempfile madness, etc. etc.  yuk.

I know our sysadmins (I used to be one) can setup the install process
to grab specific RPMs.  Installing new RPMs across all machines on the
network is also pretty easy (if it's set up properly), and I'm sure
you can find or
make one for Ruby.  Our  sysadmin folks are locally stationed and very rational,
which is not always the case.

I just keep an installation of Ruby 1.8 on an NFS mounted drive, and
point to it when needed (shebang).   For certain scripts that are
ClearCase controlled, there is also an accompanying Ruby installation
inside ClearCase, so the right version is always selected, and always
available.  That's probably a bit extreme, though.

Since you're using CGI stuff, will this be run on any particular
server?  If so, it may not even need to be NFS mounted.

--
Rob