[davidroetzel]

Ruby 1.9.1, the first "stable" release of the 1.9 series, was released back in January 2009.

So when 1.9.3 is EOLd in 2015, the 1.9 series will have been around for 6 whole years. Seems like quite a lot of time to me.

And of course, as others have pointed out, upgrading to 2.0 is fairly painless. Going from 2.0 to 2.1 should be even smoother.

[gurkendoktor]

Versions numbers don't help when code can break from 1.9.1->1.9.2 and 1.9.2->1.9.3.

In any case, life feels good on Ruby 1.8. I can jump straight to 2.0 without ever worrying about #Encoding comments. :D

[ksec]

6 years is almost too long for me. They should have a plan to only allow it to stick around for 5 years and not more.

And to me, this is the great thing about Ruby and its communities in general. It is about moving forwards and not afraid of reinventing the wheel if you have a better idea.