Hm, Rails still doesn't work fully on 1.9.1. There's a few bugs relating to character encoding in templates still, you can find details on Lighthouse. It mostly works though. I've switched exclusively to 1.9.1 for console work, which is unaffected by the ActionView bug.
I agree with the point about how projects not being ported to 1.9 begin to look unmaintained. It's been 3 months in stable now, and a year of betas before that - I can't help but start thinking any project not moving as fast as possible towards compatibility might not be one anyone should be relying on.
Most unforgivable offenders: Mongrel and the DB libraries
I don't think anyone thinks Ruby 1.9 is a stepping stone for Ruby 2.0. We're not using it because it isn't fully supported yet by Rails (so /agree sho).
Perhaps more importantly, a lot of us are waiting for Rails 3.0 to move our existing applications over since there are huge risks and pains with shifting to a new version of a framework from something that currently works fairly well.
Fair enough. But for us, we've had so much pain from 1.8 that the second it looks like 1.9 mostly works we are throwing the switch. If I never have to hear or think about 1.8 leaking memory ever again that will still be too soon.
Admittedly, it wasn't that much of a problem with web, most of my "fun" from 1.8 has been with long-running processes. If you're not running them, or trying to run them I should say, there would probably be a lot less urgency - although it is faster in general anyway, so might be worth a bit of pain.
On their site, I see some Ubuntu packages which would probably work. But once I get to the point of "probably work", I might as well install the gem version.
The ones provided by Brightbox. I'm under the impression that they should work on Debian seeing that Ubuntu is based on Debian. As far as I know they work out-of-the-box without even having to run the Phusion Passenger installer manually.
What is even more surprising: getting mongrel and DB libraries to work is just a case of a simple 'search and replace' of a couple of things in the C language components of those libraries.
Oops - I didn't want to make a big fuss about it! It's only when you're using unicode in templates, won't affect the vast majority of people. It 99.9% works : )
Well, for all those developers outside US it's more like 0,01% works, because unicode is always used in templates. But hopefully it'll soon be resolved.
I agree with the point about how projects not being ported to 1.9 begin to look unmaintained. It's been 3 months in stable now, and a year of betas before that - I can't help but start thinking any project not moving as fast as possible towards compatibility might not be one anyone should be relying on.
Most unforgivable offenders: Mongrel and the DB libraries
Most pleasant surprise: RMagick!