[jamesgeck0]

Is it reasonable to expect packages to maintain compatibility with a version of Ruby from 2004? I don't know many Python libraries that still work with Python 2.2. Not sure about Perl 5.8, but I couldn't even find a link to download a binary.

[leephillips]

Is it reasonable to expect packages to maintain compatibility with a version of Ruby from 2004?

That in itself would not be reasonable. But it seems as if Ruby's own libraries broke going from 1.8.1. -> 1.8.7. Regardless of the number of years involved, that's kind of unexpected. But I'm not familiar with the Ruby world, and maybe that change in version number is considered major.

The whole experience left me with reduced confidence in Ruby stuff and I still avoid it and programs that use it. The comments below by people who know more about the Ruby ecosystem than I do don't give me any reason to change.

[angelbob]

(Disclaimer: I am a professional Ruby developer)

The problem is that the various packaged versions of Ruby are a shambles. RVM has a number of significant problems and difficulties (rbenv is both better and worse).

Right now getting a good, modern Ruby version on a standard modern computer is a big pain in the ass.

As long as that stays true, we will be dinged for not supporting old (but common) versions.

Years from now, when everybody has good 1.9 compatibility, things may be better. At least, if 2.0 doesn't have the same problems...

[jes5199]

the problem is that it's much, much harder to upgrade ruby from 1.8.7 to 1.9.3 than it is to upgrade perl from 5.8 to 5.14

So many of the language features have changed in ruby programmer will have to edit every file in her project, and upgrade every single dependency, just to get her application running on a new ruby interpreter. Add that to the culture of "let's use as much 3rd party code as possible!" and the library writers emulating the core developers and changing their APIs all the time ... the process of upgrading an interpreter converges on "rewrite the entire application"

Which is what we do. And some percentage of those rewrites are in languages that don't have this problem.

[slurgfest]

If you know what you are doing then you know what version of the interpreter you want and have the ability to install it. Once upon a time I wrestled hard to compile tarballs, these days it is really rare that I have to do more than ./configure; make; make install in the worst case.