Why is Ruby 1.8.6 RC1 more recent than Ruby 1.8.6 Final?

[Jian Lin]

Getting to the Ruby One-click installer for Windows, we may go to

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

and then

http://rubyinstaller.org/download.html

however over there, it seems that

Ruby 1.8.6 RC1 (patchlevel 383)

is actually more recent than

Ruby 1.8.6 RC2 (patchlevel 27)

or

Ruby 1.8.6 Final (patchlevel 26)

If I install them on different machines, the RC1 actually shows a more
recent date than RC2 or Final, by using

ruby -v

What's the rule? Does it go strictly by patchlevel? That is, the
patchlevel decides how update it is, instead of whether it is RC1, RC2,
or Final?

 

[Luis Lavena]

Getting to the Ruby One-click installer for Windows, we may go to

   http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

and then

   http://rubyinstaller.org/download.html

however over there, it seems that

    Ruby 1.8.6 RC1 (patchlevel 383)

is actually more recent than

    Ruby 1.8.6 RC2 (patchlevel 27)

or

    Ruby 1.8.6 Final (patchlevel 26)

If I install them on different machines, the RC1 actually shows a more
recent date than RC2 or Final, by using

ruby -v

What's the rule? Does it go strictly by patchlevel? That is, the
patchlevel decides how update it is, instead of whether it is RC1, RC2,
or Final?

Here you're talking about a set of Installers, not Ruby itself.

I've answered your question over Stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-recent-than-ruby-1-8-6-final/1877105#1877105

Which I'm going to copy here for the sake of help others find the
information in the future:

"Hello,

Ruby-Lang website advertise a package of Ruby for Windows called One-
Click Installer.

That installer used to have their own version schema, as you note with
`186-26` or `186-27 RC2`

On RubyForge website (news section) you will find that efforts of the
project as moved towards newer RubyInstaller packages, and is
indicated there and the RubyInstaller download page that `186-27 RC2`
is part of the legacy versions.

Latest RubyInstaller (currently in Release Candidate attempts) provide
information of the correct Ruby version that includes and install, as
indicated by the version string `1.8.6-p383` which is patchlevel 383
of Ruby.

Please note that you're comparing different type of packages. One-
Click Installer versus RubyInstaller.

You can read more about this in the [wiki][1] and the latest
announcement [at RubyForge][2]

Hope this answer your questions.

[1]: http://wiki.github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller
[2]: http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=35591"