# Upgrading from Ruby 1.8.5 -\> 1.8.6.. Yes or No? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [September 13, 2007, 6:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrading-from-ruby-1-8-5-1-8-6-yes-or-no/114515 "2007-09-13T18:53:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/85e7bf/32.png) [@jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jeannibee)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2007, 6:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrading-from-ruby-1-8-5-1-8-6-yes-or-no/114515/1 "2007-09-13T18:53:46Z")
Hi Is there any reason I should upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6. I tried to do that about 2 weeks agon (on Ubuntu Feisty) and I messed up my development environment COMPLETELY. I couldn’t run anything related to ruby / rails as I would get some errors about Thread.so being not found. (If you need to, search this forums for Thread.so and you will see my history of problems I never got fixed aside from re-installing Linux and leaving rails at 1.8.5) So, should I stick with Ruby 1.8.5 or not? Thanks for your opinions. ---
**Author:** ![jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/85e7bf/32.png) [@jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jeannibee)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2007, 10:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrading-from-ruby-1-8-5-1-8-6-yes-or-no/114515/2 "2007-09-13T22:05:41Z")
Jean N. wrote: > Hi > > Is there any reason I should upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6. Not that I can see. I moved to 1.8.6 on my development box without any problem but I was forced to build from source there. When I went to find an rpm for my disto (CentOS-4.5) the highest available build that was congruent with CentOS was 1.8.5. (I found an 1.8.6 rpm set for CentOS-4.5 on the net but when I installed it insisted on going into /usr/local rather than /usr and in consequence openssl and readline did not work.) My attempts to package 1.8.6 as an rpm failed because the ruby.spec for CentOS is more complex than most ruby programs that I write and I could not get the file lists to eliminate duplicate entries. SO I loaded 1.8.5 instead and am not having any problems with it. As always, your mileage may vary… ---
**Author:** ![jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/85e7bf/32.png) [@jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jeannibee)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2007, 1:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrading-from-ruby-1-8-5-1-8-6-yes-or-no/114515/3 "2007-09-17T13:24:21Z")
> So, should I stick with Ruby 1.8.5 or not? > Read this thread… it’s from June so perhaps things have changed, but > my > memory is that the consensus was not to go to 1.8.6… seems there > reasons would apply to you as well. [http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/mongrel-users/2007-June/003716.html](http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/mongrel-users/2007-June/003716.html) ---
**Author:** ![jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/85e7bf/32.png) [@jeannibee](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jeannibee)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2007, 1:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrading-from-ruby-1-8-5-1-8-6-yes-or-no/114515/4 "2007-09-17T13:25:30Z")
Jean N. wrote: > I tried to do that about 2 weeks agon (on Ubuntu Feisty) and I messed up > my development environment COMPLETELY. I use Fiesty and haven’t had much success with the repositories version of Ruby and Rails. I couldn’t get advance debugging stuff working. So I followed the directions on the NetBeans site to install Ruby from source into my home directory (not installed as root) and then can have mulitple versions installed and swap between them. [http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/RubyGems](http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/RubyGems) I have to specifiy the version of Ruby I use when calling scripts. instead of > script/server I use > ~/ruby-1.8.5/bin/ruby script/server Because I use NetBeans I have set this up once in the configuration and it autmatically uses the ruby version I have selected. Cheers, Anthony R.