Forum: Ruby-core Ruby 1.8.7-preview4 has been released

Folks,

It is my pleasure to announce that the fourth and hopefully the last
preview of Ruby 1.8.7 has just been released.  Changes from the
previous preview release include fixes for many bugs and memory leaks,
follow-up for security problems, some incompatibility issues and a few
new backports.

The new version of Ruby includes many bug fixes, lots of feature
enhancements and some performance improvements since 1.8.6 while
maintaining stability and backward compatibility with the previous
release to a high degree, although there are ongoing efforts that need
to be done toward adopting RubySpec.

The source code package is available in three formats at the following
locations:

  ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.bz2
  ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-preview4.zip

Checksums:

  MD5 (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.bz2) = f2093521a67983dd42776efc70fc0905
  SHA256 (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.bz2) = 
9f81d584a5b1bda92d933c48a336edd0ce6818eaa3a4e95cab59a73c85a7b285
  SIZE (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.bz2) = 4098091

  MD5 (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.gz) = b983608947fac9a044ad8e6ee5c32479
  SHA256 (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.gz) = 
9e45e09ae12e0bc0c89be20c588f26b0fdddf9f1bdb2d2b59ecedfbb7f1cec3c
  SIZE (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.tar.gz) = 4795826

  MD5 (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.zip) = 3c208e6f99cf7be80ed2e56a44fff337
  SHA256 (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.zip) = 
27cf4c38c2ff9ae6045f7eefcf5164a30a69b1042af64cf729dc180363e629f8
  SIZE (ruby-1.8.7-preview4.zip) = 5897462

For a brief list of user visible changes and a full list of all
changes, see the bundled files named NEWS and ChangeLog, which are
also available at the following locations:

  http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_8_7_pr...
  http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_8_7_pr...

Please test it out and drop us a report in the following tracker if
you find any problem:

  http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?atid=22040&group_id=...

Some known problems are on the list and when you find one it may be
fixed already, so please look through all items querying with "State"
set to "Any" before submitting a new one.

The final release will be released by the end of this month, so this
is your last chance to report problems!  Please help us debug this
preview using your libraries and applications and make the final
release production ready.

Regards,

On May 25, 8:47 pm, "Akinori MUSHA" <k...@iDaemons.org> wrote:
> The new version of Ruby includes many bug fixes, lots of feature
> enhancements and some performance improvements since 1.8.6 while
> maintaining stability and backward compatibility with the previous
> release to a high degree, although there are ongoing efforts that need
> to be done toward adopting RubySpec.

Is the BasicObject class (from Ruby 1.9) planned to be back-ported to
Ruby 1.8.x?

Also, will OpenStruct derive from BasicObject?  So that we no longer
need to manually undef type and id to use those properties in our open
structs?

  require 'ostruct'

  class OpenStruct
    undef type if respond_to? :type # deprecated in Ruby 1.8; removed
in 1.9
    undef id   if respond_to? :id   # same thing
  end

Thanks for your consideration.

At Wed, 28 May 2008 06:04:56 +0900,
Suraj N. Kurapati wrote:
> On May 25, 8:47 pm, "Akinori MUSHA" <k...@iDaemons.org> wrote:
> > The new version of Ruby includes many bug fixes, lots of feature
> > enhancements and some performance improvements since 1.8.6 while
> > maintaining stability and backward compatibility with the previous
> > release to a high degree, although there are ongoing efforts that need
> > to be done toward adopting RubySpec.
> 
> Is the BasicObject class (from Ruby 1.9) planned to be back-ported to
> Ruby 1.8.x?

I'm afraid it is a bit too radical to change class hierarchy (or
topology, rather) in the middle of 1.8.  It would break certain kinds
of development tools and runtime environment (IDE/RAD tools,
Squeak-like environment, etc.).

> Also, will OpenStruct derive from BasicObject?  So that we no longer
> need to manually undef type and id to use those properties in our open
> structs?
> 
>   require 'ostruct'
> 
>   class OpenStruct
>     undef type if respond_to? :type # deprecated in Ruby 1.8; removed in 1.9
>     undef id   if respond_to? :id   # same thing
>   end

It would be better to undefine methods with common names individually.
Losing object_id, class, dup, freeze, taint, etc. is overkill I would
think.