> If Ubuntu 12.04 if a LTS release, and Ruby 1.8.7 goes out of support in June of
> 2013, then why is the default still 1.8.7?
>
> Ruby 1.9.2 was released in 2010. Ruby 1.9.3 was released in October of this year.
First, there’s almost nobody in the Ubuntu development community doing any Ruby work. Packages are just imported from Debian, and Ubuntu follows what is done on the Debian side.
In the Debian/Ruby team, we are currently transitioning to a new packaging helper (gem2deb) that makes it much
easier to support several Ruby versions. Once this will be done, switching to 1.9.3 by default will be very easy. We already provide a way for the sysadmin to change the default on a system.
Now, doing that transition takes time, and we could have used *your* help (and could still use it). We are still quite on time to do it for Debian wheezy, but it sounds very hard to do it for Ubuntu 12.04 unless someone from Ubuntu steps
up to help.