Misc #16671: BASERUBY version policy

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)

[ko1 (Koichi Sasada)]

Ruby 2.7 (MRI) requires Ruby 2.2 or later (== BASERUBY) to build from repository.
Tarball does not need any installed Ruby.
To build latest Ruby from repository, you need to build Ruby 2.2 and later from a tarball.

Can we make the BASERUBY version update policy?

Background

To use ISeq#to_a (specific format) Ruby 2.2 or later is needed from Ruby 2.7.
The oldest version used by RubyCI machines was Ruby 2.2, so I determined update.
I needed to file a ticket about this version bump, sorry.

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related: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16668

[ko1 (Koichi Sasada)]

• Related to Bug #16668: Syntax error in tool/vcs.rb added

[naruse (Yui NARUSE)]

Through the discussion around CI, I reached a conclusion "Runtime environment and development environment are different".

Though CentOS and macOS bundles very old ruby, but it's no problem because they are just runtime environment.
If people want to develop Ruby master on those environment, they can install latest stable ruby with tarball.

Therefore BASERUBY can be a reasonable newer stable version.
It means newer than Ruby installed by default on for example CentOS.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

naruse (Yui NARUSE) wrote in #note-2:

Through the discussion around CI, I reached a conclusion "Runtime environment and development environment are different".

Note that it is true for years, for instance, Windows 9x was supported as a runtime environment but not as a development environment, at least.

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

I'm not against this issue but for record: commit 8a72c77c7920d129818b7b83bb4fa669cd7e3f7d says "as requested by devs, support for BASERUBY prior to 2.1". and the "devs" here included ko1. At that time his machine was a Panasonic laptop running Windows, and had older BASERUBY. Windows situation got improved since then (we now have CI). This might no longer be a problem.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Related to Bug #16845: Building Ruby with system Ruby 1.8.7 results in make failing due to syntax error in ./tool/lib/vcs.rb added

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Status changed from Open to Assigned
• Assignee set to hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

How about the Ruby version provided by the stable Ubuntu release?

• https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=ruby
  • bionic (18.04LTS): 2.5.1, standard EOL date is 2023/04
  • focal (20.04LTS): 2.7, standard EOL date is 2025/04
  • jammy (22.04LTS): 3.0, standard EOL date is 2027/04

So, we can upgrade the BASERUBY version of Ruby 3.3 to Ruby 2.7 in this year.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

What we often tend to write frequently are safe navigation operator and indented here-docs.
So I'll be happy it were 2.3 or later.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Status changed from Assigned to Closed

Applied in changeset git|1edef08ddadf0bd76122f830ef7953cda61c78aa.

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Added version policy of BASERUBY

[Misc #16671]

[matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)]

I agree with upgrading BASERUBY. The version should be determined by the latest version of the distribution (Debian?).

Matz.

[vo.x (Vit Ondruch)]

Why Ubuntu / Debian and not CentOS / RHEL 7? IOW I think it would be probably better to base the policy on Ruby releases then on external factor such as Linux distribution versions.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

CentOS 7 will be EOL at 2024/06 and CentOS 8+ will be not provided in the future.

I know Red Hat switched them to CentOS Stream. Unfortunately, CentOS Stream (and RHEL) is not major distribution for Ruby developers.