Feature #17468: Deprecate RUBY_DEVEL

• Status: Open
• Priority: Normal
• Assignee: -
• Target version: 3.1

[naruse (Yui NARUSE)]

Some configuration of Ruby use RUBY_DEVEL, which depends PATCH_LEVEL.
But depending PATCH_LEVEL causes issues which will become revealed on the final release.
Though we release some previews and RCs, they don't contributes the quality around RUBY_DEVEL.

Therefore to ensure CI tests the quality of the final release, we need to deprecate RUBY_DEVEL.

[naruse (Yui NARUSE)]

• Backport deleted (2.5: UNKNOWN, 2.6: UNKNOWN, 2.7: UNKNOWN)
• Tracker changed from Bug to Feature

[jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans)]

I looked into this. If we removed RUBY_DEVEL, we would make it so ruby_debug_log was never defined, since it is only defined if RUBY_DEVEL is defined. Basically, removing RUBY_DEVEL is equivalent to removing the removing the entire debug logging feature.

I think a safer and less invasive change is to make RUBY_DEVEL not depend on PATCH_LEVEL. By doing so, Ruby developers that want to use debug logging can still manually use RUBY_DEVEL=yes when configuring, but it will never be enabled automatically. I submitted a pull request for this: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/4993. One change it makes is to set USE_RUBY_DEBUG_LOG to 1 instead of 0 if RUBY_DEVEL is defined and USE_RUBY_DEBUG_LOG isn't. Since RUBY_DEVEL is no longer enabled automatically, the main reason to enable it would be to support debug logging, in which case I think 1 is a better default.