{"id":681,"date":"2011-05-27T11:04:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T09:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=681"},"modified":"2011-05-27T11:04:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T09:04:44","slug":"changes-to-ruby-in-debian-and-ubuntu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=681","title":{"rendered":"Changes to Ruby in Debian (and Ubuntu)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(this is a copy of an mail sent to ruby-core@ and ruby-talk@)<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of 2011, the Debian Ruby team has been working on\u00a0several big changes. Those changes all are available in Debian unstable,\u00a0some of them are also available in Debian testing, and they should all\u00a0be available in the next Debian and Ubuntu releases.<\/p>\n

I think that it addresses most of the reasonable concerns about Ruby in\u00a0Debian.<\/p>\n

Using alternatives to switch between Ruby implementations<\/h3>\n

The alternatives system is now used to manage the “ruby” symlink and the\u00a0other related symlinks, making it easy to switch between Ruby implementations (only Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.X at the moment) (see this mail<\/a> for details). The default\u00a0choice for Ruby is still 1.8, but this change will make it easy for us\u00a0to make a switch to 1.9.X by default (likely by the release of Debian\u00a0wheezy).<\/p>\n

Installing gems executables to \/usr\/local\/bin<\/h3>\n

Rubygems (both as a standalone package, and as shipped with Ruby 1.9.X)\u00a0now install executables to \/usr\/local\/bin. (The other files still get installed under \/var, see this mail<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Enabling gem update –system<\/h3>\n

gem update –system has been re-enabled. Since upgrading rubygems to a\u00a0version that may not have been properly tested with the rest of the\u00a0Debian system may cause issues in the user’s system, there’s a big\u00a0warning about that. The user can confirm and upgrade rubygems anyway by\u00a0defining an environment variable.<\/p>\n

New gem2deb packaging helper<\/h3>\n

There’s a new packaging helper, named gem2deb, that makes it very easy\u00a0to generate Debian source packages from Rubygems. We are in the process\u00a0of migrating all ruby libraries packaged in Debian to that new helper.\u00a0It will take some time, though (help is welcomed).<\/p>\n

Transition status: http:\/\/pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org\/wheezy\/<\/a><\/p>\n

One big benefit of the switch to gem2deb for the Ruby community is that,\u00a0in the process, we are enabling test suites at build time for each\u00a0package and each Ruby implementation. This should make it easy to detect\u00a0regressions in new interpreter versions.<\/p>\n

Ruby 1.9.3<\/h3>\n

We will switch to Ruby 1.9.3 ASAP (probably when it is branched off\u00a0trunk, with a package first in Debian experimental). Since the Ruby\u00a0compatibility version issue is likely to stay around, we will\u00a0re-evaluate how we are dealing with it (to avoid the ruby1.9.1 package\u00a0<=> ruby -v = 1.9.2 problem that confuses many users). This is likely by\u00a0switching the package name to ruby1.9.3 (keep a ruby1.9.1 package for\u00a0compatibility). The package containing the shared library will stay\u00a0libruby1.9.1.<\/p>\n

Links<\/h3>\n