

Experience Switching From Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 1.9 - mudge
http://extralogical.net/2009/07/ruby-one-niner/

======
RyanMcGreal
`sudo make install`

AFAIK if you enter `sudo checkinstall` instead, it installs into your package
manager so you can remove it more easily later.

<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CheckInstall>

~~~
plaes
Ugh, I am sick of seeing those 'sudo make install' howtos potentially messing
with system :S

The one powerful feature of Linux distributions is the package management.
Every file that you have installed on your filesystem is accounted for...

And now I'm left wondering how this guy updates to next (major) ruby version
:P

~~~
ionfish
This is fine if the package maintainers are relatively up-to-date with the
software you require, but often they aren't. Ubuntu Hardy's version of Ruby
1.9 is pretty outdated and thus probably doesn't include, amongst other
things, some rather vital security fixes.

Don't get me wrong—I'm all in favour of package managers. Sometimes, however,
they aren't sufficient.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
But checkinstall (rather than make install) still uses the up-to-date source
files. It just allows your package manager to _remove_ the application when
you're done with it (e.g. when you're ready to upgrade to a sill-newer
version).

------
Andys
I switched to 1.9 for several greenfields projects. The postgresql gem builds
cleanly, as does thin, which can be used in place of mongrel.

The biggest gotcha was having to modify my application to explicitly open text
files in UTF8 mode. But the more than 100% execution speedup was a nice
upside.

------
Tichy
I reverted to 1.8 because I could not find documentation for the Standard
Library of 1.9. Generating it myself also proved impossible (out of memory
errors and other issues).

~~~
ionfish
Yeah, ruby-doc.org is pretty annoying in this regard, especially since they do
actually have the stdlib documentation available, they just don't link to it.
Have a look at this search, for example:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aruby-
doc.org%2Fcore-1....](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aruby-
doc.org%2Fcore-1.9%2Fclasses+array)

There's the documentation for the Array class, but you can't get to it from
the 1.9 core documentation:

<http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9/index.html>

~~~
Tichy
I think that is only core, though, not the standard lib. It started for me
with hearing the rumor that JSON would be part of the standard lib of Ruby
1.9. I was unable to confirm that online. Eventually I peeked into the
"Programming Ruby" book in a bookshop and thus was able to confirm that Ruby
1.9.1 indeed comes with JSON.

~~~
carbon8
ruby-doc really should have this. Maybe if jamesbritt sees these comments he
can let us know what's up.

Here's a decent source for ruby 1.9 docs, though:

<http://railsapi.com/doc/ruby-v1.9/>

