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Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising (though not unwelcome) to see that the only distro at the highest level of support ('Supported') is Debian 5.0 (i.e. Lenny). Some irony here: Lenny currently has Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.0 (as a distinct package - 1.8.7 is the default Ruby); Squeeze (Debian 6.0) has 1.8.7-p299 as a Ruby default and 1.9.1 for the 1.9 branch. Since Squeeze just froze, it is unlikely to release with 1.9.2 - though they may make an exception. Point being: the only distro that enjoys the fullest level of support has no stable version with 1.9.2.

OSX, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Symbian make the next level ('Best Effort'), and all other Linux distros only come in at the third level ('Perhaps').

I respect the developers' frankness, and it's not something I have to worry much about, but the names of the support levels don't scream "use me on a multi-billion dollar project" for corporate folks.

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We use Debian for the CI machine. CI failures are taken quite seriously, and we have a person maintaining this CI box. I believe that is why Debian is considered highest.

The next level of OS support are core developers that use that OS for work / home, but we don't have CI machines.

I think if we had more CI boxes, then more platforms could join the "highest level" support. I know there was a conversation on the Japanese dev list about this, and I can try to dig it up if people are interested.

When you say "we," I presume you mean ruby-core?

I am on ruby-core. :-)

That's what I thought :-)

What are your CI boxes running? The Hudson team used to have a number of Hudson slaves running various OSs and distros just building Hudson on-demand.

That cluster drifted away, but there are a lot of Hudson servers out there that are mostly idle, and people seem generally happy to donate the CPU time. I've got an Ubuntu one here that could run Ruby slave builds.

akr maintains the CI machine. It is running Lenny.

You can see the output for the latest 1.9.2 build here:

http://www.rubyist.net/~akr/chkbuild/debian/ruby-1.9.2/last....

All of the latest builds can be accessed here:

http://www.rubyist.net/~akr/chkbuild/debian/

I would like to see more CI machines get deployed, but I think there are a couple challenges:

1) We use custom CI software (and the docs are in Japanese): http://github.com/yugui/chkbuild

2) We have no process for people donating CPU time

I can translate the docs, but that still doesn't overcome the burden of running custom CI software. I'll email ruby-core about #2 because I'd really like to see more CI machines go up.

What features does chkbuild offer that Hudson doesn't? Should I put a feature request in?

If there's some stumbling block to adoption, it seems that switching the single CI box to Hudson, then utilizing the numerous Hudson boxes out there as slaves is quicker than trying to get people on board with chkbuild.

That they support any distro is just icing on the cake. Usually these sort of projects don't support OS's at all, that's downstream's problem.

Now I'm wondering how you are taking "support" here. I didn't take it to mean "offer formal support for." That is, there's no phone number or email where someone will respond, is there?

When you say "these sort of projects", I assume you mean open source. When I look at Vim.org or Perl.org, they explain how to get source or binaries and install on various operating systems and distros. There's no differentiation in level of support or otherwise. This may be what you mean by "not supporting", but I found Ruby's explicit division of levels of support surprising.

Tenderlove's note explains things, but again I worry that the wording of the release notice may be off-putting to PHBs. Probably they are not Ruby's target audience - though I see plenty of discussion, books and conferences about Ruby for the Enterprise.

I don't mean to dwell on any of this in a bad way, and again I'm not complaining. I've never seen explicit divisions of support on something like Ruby before, so I posted.

No I mean support in the same sense you do. Their "supported" OS's are obviously just things they have access to, and know that it compiles & tests fine there.

E.g. they only have AIX 5 in "perhaps", that's only in the "Best Effort" category in Perl's case because a few dedicated individuals still build and test on it before release.

Found it! Here is the email describing the support levels:

  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-dev/41101

Thanks for the link. After reading that, I'm very suprised to see this for the 'Perhaps' category - given that every Linux distro other than Debian falls into that group:

    We think Ruby works on it, however, we do not care about it.
    I sometimes release Ruby even if there are issues on it.

The release part I get, but "we do not care about it" seems awfully dismissive. Maybe it came out differently than it was meant.

I suspect that part of what you are percieving as tone in these statements is an artifact of english not being the author's first language.

backports.org

Right, but somewhat beside the point. That is, assuming you have Debian (at whatever level) and want 1.9.2, there are lots of ways you might get it. Backports is always a good option for newer things, compiled for stable. (In the case of Ruby, I would probably go with rvm first, but that's neither here nor there.)

But the irony is that Ruby says "This is the distro that has our highest level of support." while simultaneously that distro does not (out of the box) support 1.9.2. Just an odd thing, and it struck me. Tenderlove's explanation is perfectly reasonable, and I'm not criticizing. It's just ironic.

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