Ruby and Debian

[Shot - Piotr Szotkowski]

Hello.

Chad Perrin:

The point of Stable is that it doesn't change, so that you'll never
have to worry about something that works suddenly breaking when you're
doing security updates or adding software. Thus, one tends to not see
new packages appear in Stable unless absolutely necessary for security
reasons.

That's why I explicitly mentioned I'm writing about upgrading to the
next stable. I prefer to automagically see there's a new stable Ruby
version and be able to easily choose whether to upgrade (with the
dependencies changed to ruby2.0) or keep the dummy ruby package at
the current version (thus keeping ruby1.8).

Also, in this particular case, the suggestion was already to install the
dummy ruby package; IMHO it only makes sense to do the same for the ri
and rdoc packages (what would be the benefit of upgrading to Ruby 2.0
but keeping the older ri and RDoc?).

Also, Debian releases stable versions fairly rarely, but Ubuntu releases
every six months (and I generally upgrade accordingly); it's really nice
not to have to track such changes in all of the non-default packages,
and use the dummy ones to do the work. )

Cheers,
-- Shot