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Comment by eccp | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this is one of the long lasting issues with RoR: most people want to try it on a recent version, but Linux distros try to package stable releases instead. You shouldn't blame the distros for not having the absolute bleeding edge version.

If really need the absolute latest version of Rails go on, have a separate install compiled from source, but there's no need to be rude with the packagers. I'm trying to learn Rails 3 and I found that JRuby works really fine with Rails 3, and using Warbler gives me nices WAR files to deploy on Tomcat, and I don't mess my default Ruby install.

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Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.3 are now considered stable by what appears to be everyone but the packagers.

apt installs Ruby using a non-standard configuration too, when you do `apt-get install ruby1.8`, the executable is `ruby1.8`. Nobody in their right minds these days would install it with the `1.8` suffix.

Ruby version management is best taken care of with RVM, as that's better built for it than a general package manager such as apt.

Rails 3.0 is hardly bleeding edge. People use it in production.

It's for the majority of sysadmins that I know...

As a compliment to my sibling's Rails comment, they're still shipping Ruby 1.8 as well, which hasn't been the main version of Ruby since January of 2009.

Additionally, apt also packages "ruby-1.9.1" which actually installs Ruby 1.9.2. More evidence that apt is fundamentally broken when it comes to Ruby package management.

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2010/08/18/ruby-1-9.2-relea... doesn't help.

No. Apt works and does not enforce what versions you use and what you call them. Debian policies are another thing. But I wouldn't call stuff fundamentally broken that quickly. Once you actually get into packaging - versioning and dependencies stop being that simple thing really. Especially if you want more than one person to use your package in a stable environment.

Also "In the name of this package, `1.9.1' indicates the Ruby library compatibility version. This package currently provides the `1.9.2' branch of Ruby, which is compatible with the `1.9.1' branch." (http://packages.debian.org/sid/ruby1.9.1)

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