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Ruby 1.8.6 Maintenance Transition

By Kirk Haines | May 21st, 2009 at 8:05AM

It is with great excitement that we want to announce the transition of legacy maintenance duties for Ruby 1.8.6 from the capable hands of Urabe Shyouhei to Engine Yard (and specifically to myself). Going forward, I will be the primary point of contact for bug and security fixes for the 1.8.6 branch of Ruby, and will remain in continual contact with Urabe to ensure the transition is completed smoothly.

Our interest in taking on 1.8.6. maintenance is specifically to maintain that legacy version for the community of developers who have written libraries/applications with specific 1.8.6 dependencies, who do not intend to port forward to future versions.

I have heard some people express concerns about Engine Yard maintaining Ruby 1.8.6: that we’re going to fork it, or do other unfriendly things with it. I want to make it clear that our plans are to be conservative as maintainers. We will fix bugs and performance issues, address security issues, and test to ensure that when releases are made, they are of as high a quality as possible. Anything else, like adding new API’s or behaviors is completely outside of a maintainer’s role, so we won’t be doing that. (Also we’re pretty excited by the new stuff in 1.9)

I look forward to working with the rest of the core team to do my part in continuing to make Ruby a top notch language.

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12 Responses to “Ruby 1.8.6 Maintenance Transition”

  1. Tarod Tarod says:

    I, for one, welcome our new Ruby 1.8.6 Overlords.

  2. Go go MBARI patches!

  3. Luis Lavena Luis Lavena says:

    I'm happy to congratulate EngineYard for taking this difficult task and keep contributing with Ruby community.

    Rest assured patches to improve compatibility for Windows will be sent, soon :-)

  4. bryanl bryanl says:

    Now would be a good time to hook up with phusion and take all their goodness and port it back into the mainline.

  5. nesquena nesquena says:

    Seconded on merging ruby enterprise edition changes into the mainline.

  6. [...] Engine Yard is now the maintainers of Ruby 1.8.6. I think it’s good to see Ruby getting some corporate boost up, although I can understand why people might be concerned. I think it’s interesting, especially since Engine Yard is also working on Rubinius, an alternative Ruby VM, and the Merb half of the Ruby/Merb merger. I get the impression that a substantial portion of the serious brainpower within the Ruby community (in terms of the people working on “things that matter” such as the Ruby language, Rails, etc.) are at Engine Yard. [...]

  7. drnic drnic says:

    Long live 1.8.6!

  8. ranlod ranlod says:

    how about 1.9.1

  9. [...] there and a lot of people depend on it. Given this, hosting company Engine Yard’s team of engineers have decided to take over the legacy maintenance duties. Hats off to [...]

  10. [...] JRuby support, our ongoing maintenance of the 1.8.6 branch of MRI and our continued sponsorship of Rubinius, we hope that Engine Yard is continuing to help Ruby and [...]

  11. rogerdpack rogerdpack says:

    1.9 as an option would be kind

  12. [...] as part of our maintainer role for 1.8.6., we published a fix as part of Ruby 1.8.6 patch-level 369 and as a part of Ruby 1.8.7 patch-level [...]