Access to old versions of Ruby core documentation?

Hey Ruby-talk,
I was wondering, is there a way I can access older versions of the
Ruby core documentation? I’m trying to debug an issue with
Kernel.select on Ruby 1.8.1 (that works fine with 1.8.6 and 1.9.1),
and I want to see if the behavior was documented to be the same as the
1.8.6 and 1.9.1 version of it.

Unfortunately, the machine I’m on also doesn’t have any of the Ri docs
installed, so I can’t see them that way. I also tried doing a ’ grep
-R “select(” * ’ in the Ruby lib directory, but didn’t see the
implementation in there. It also doesn’t look like ruby-doc.org has
the earlier versions either.

One other question, Is there a bugtracker for versions of Ruby earlier
than 1.8.6? Redmine.ruby-lang.org seems to be fairly recent and
doesn’t look to have issues older than 2008, I wanted to look and see
if maybe I was hitting a bug that was fixed in a later version of
Ruby.

  • Lee

On Jun 25, 2009, at 09:56 , Lee Hinman wrote:

I was wondering, is there a way I can access older versions of the
Ruby core documentation? I’m trying to debug an issue with
Kernel.select on Ruby 1.8.1 (that works fine with 1.8.6 and 1.9.1),
and I want to see if the behavior was documented to be the same as the
1.8.6 and 1.9.1 version of it.

multiruby is probably the easiest way to get the sources to all the
versions you’re interested in, unpack them, build them, etc… it
doesn’t do ri by default, but you can go into the ~/.multiruby/build/*
dirs and grep around or build and install all the ri info (into
~/.multiruby/install/*).