My fellow Rubyists,

No worries, I won't give a uberlengthy speech. ;)

It's just, the speedy, shiny new Ruby 1.9.1 is soon to be released. Actually, it already should have been, but there are some things that need to be fixed, you know how it is…

Anyway, here's how we are looking:

We have ebuilds for Ruby 1.9.1 up to patchlevel 129, they build fine, and we pass all but a few tests. ruby-config is replaced by an eselect module that allows seamless switching of Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 including the gem command. We are now verifying the ebuilds in the tree that already have the "build for ruby 1.9" flag set, if they still work fine.

My personal ETA on when it will hit the tree is $release_time + 6 to 8 weeks. We want to be sure that our infrastructure works with the final release.

Want it now or want to help testing?

You can test-drive the release candidates, they are in the Ruby overlay. Via layman: layman -a ruby.

If you got any feedback, or questions, you can reach the Ruby team via ruby@gentoo.org or IRC.

Major packaging changes and Gentoo

Some well-known Ruby libraries are now included by upstream. Our beloved RubyGems is on board just as is Rake. For us on Gentoo this means that we no longer have to rely on the auto_gem.rb magic that caused quite some trouble in the past. On the other hand, with too much bundled software being a concern for us, we decided not to include rake, but to offer it – as before – in dev-ruby/rake.

For more information, here are some links: