Ruby ports: should we retain archaic versions or dump?

[Sergio Had]

There is a discussion here: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/22181

What we have now is rather odd. Ruby port installs pre-historic version and everything depending on it is outdated by many years.

I don’t think anyone should need Ruby 1.8, 1.8.6 and 1.9 in three separate ports even for compatibility. Arguably no one should need any of these at all.

Ruby 3.1+ should work on 10.5+, including PowerPC. Even if something is discovered not to work on 10.5–10.6, the right solution is to fix such issue with Ruby upstream rather than remain stuck at archaic versions (nothing can be updated to current versions if Ruby itself is that old).

Having said that, I am fine with retaining support for 1.8–1.9 in a passive way: I can update existing ports preserving whatever old versions are there and add new ones for new Ruby. In a case someone wants to keep supporting old Ruby.

Generally, IMO, we should follow Python model: no unversioned ports, no “Ruby”, no dragging something ridiculously archaic that could have been needed for 10.3 which is not supported anyway.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20240118/70f2dd74/attachment.htm>