Ruby 1.9 as default

[Stanislav Sedov]

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...

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...

-- 
Stanislav Sedov
ST4096-RIPE

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