Plans for 1.8.7

Posted by Urabe Shyouhei on 6 Oct 2011

Hello, and thank you for your getting into our community.

I know most of you more or less use version 1.8.7 of Ruby today. It was released in 2008 and was a state-of-art Ruby release back then. – I am proud to say it is no longer. Ruby's core developers have been actively working on their new version, 1.9, and they are about to release new 1.9.3. I have been using 1.9 for years and now I cannot go back to the days without it. Rich features. Faster execution. Rubygems integrated. Rails works perfectly. I cannot but say it is totally wonderful. Everyone please, use 1.9.

But at the same time I know you cannot switch to 1.9 right now for various reasons. Maybe you have already deployed your application with 1.8.7. Maybe you use a 3rd party library and that is for 1.8.7 only. Or maybe your Linux distribution only supports 1.8.7. So I hereby announce you how long you can stick to it. It is OK if you are using 1.8.7 today but after a while, it will be shut down.

Please be ready.

Schedule:

• We continue to provide normal maintenance for 1.8.7 as usual, until June 2012. You can safely assume we provide bugfixes and no incompatibility shall be introduced.

• After that we stop bugfixes. We still provide security fixes until June 2013, in case you are still using 1.8.7.

• We will no longer support 1.8.7 in all senses after June 2013.