# Access to old versions of Ruby core documentation?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/access-to-old-versions-of-ruby-core-documentation/171044>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [June 25, 2009, 6:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/access-to-old-versions-of-ruby-core-documentation/171044 "2009-06-25T18:57:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Lee\_Hinman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/ce73a5/32.png) [@Lee\_Hinman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Lee_Hinman)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2009, 6:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/access-to-old-versions-of-ruby-core-documentation/171044/1 "2009-06-25T18:57:17Z")

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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](http://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](http://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

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Lee\_Hinman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/ce73a5/32.png) [@Lee\_Hinman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Lee_Hinman)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2009, 7:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/access-to-old-versions-of-ruby-core-documentation/171044/2 "2009-06-25T19:57:07Z")

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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/\*).