Ruby 1.9 as default

[Steve Wills]

On Jun 1, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Stanislav Sedov wrote:

> On Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:32:53 -0400
> Steve Wills <swills at FreeBSD.org> mentioned:
> 
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> I think we should try to make Ruby 1.9 the default Ruby again and would
>> like to see it done before 9.1 is released. I've submitted a patch which
>> does this and requested and exp-run from portmgr.
>> 
>> I would like to get feedback on this idea. If you have experience with
>> Ruby 1.9 as default, good or bad, please speak up. You can test this by
>> setting RUBY_DEFAULT_VER=1.9 in /etc/make.conf or editing Mk/bsd.ruby.mk
>> and setting the same variable there.
>> 
> 
> I'm not sure it's a good idea.
> Ruby 1.9 still has some nasty bugs on FreeBSD, related to the threads and
> fork.  That is fork in ruby 1.9 hangs sometimes...

Could you give me some more info on this? If I can reproduce it perhaps I can track it down and solve it.

> OTOH, I've been running ruby 1.9 as default on both of my desktops and have
> not seen major problems except this one.  Still, it'd be nice for someone
> to fix it first (I remember there were a lot of eager commiters at the time
> I gave up my commit bit).
> 
> The main question is whether the switch to 1.9 will be beneficial for our
> users.  Apart from some libraries targeting 1.9 exclusivly now, most of of
> them still work with 1.8 and there're still some that work with 1.8 only.
> Given that most of the ports users mostly care for 3rd party applications
> to work, I'm not sure if the switch to 1.9 will be a win for them...


Isn't 1.9 a bit faster than 1.8? And 1.8 doesn't build with clang while 1.9 does, so we'll at least want to switch it before 10.0 comes out, IMHO. Also, 1.9 has been the default version from ruby-lang.org for a long time and the community is making good progress towards moving to 1.9 over all. I think most things work with 1.9 now, but I could be wrong. Are there specific apps that you are thinking of that don't work with 1.9? 1.9 definitely seems to pass all the tests that 1.8 passes and more.

As far as what users of ports want, the point of this mail was to get them to speak up and voice their opinions. :)

BTW, do you use 1.8 or 1.9? Actually, I'm betting you use Rubinius now that I think about it, no?

Steve