RFC: Dropping support for ruby 1.8.7

[Louise Crow]

tl;dr We'd like to drop support for ruby 1.8.7. 
 
Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 reached end of life in July 2014 [1]. Although security support for 1.8.7 will be maintained via our supported Linux distros for some time [2], it's getting harder to find gems with support for 1.8.7 and to maintain 1.8.7 compatibility in the core code. Ultimately, dropping 1.8.7 would allow us to clean up the code in several places, making it easier to understand and maintain.
 
We're going to switch our own installs away from 1.8.7 before we make the next Alaveteli release. We'd also _like_ to make this release of Alaveteli (0.21) the last one which supports 1.8.7, but we know that a significant number of other installs are still using 1.8.7. 
 
Of our supported distros, debian wheezy and ubuntu precise both have later versions of ruby available, but debian squeeze doesn't. You could use a ruby version manager like rvm [3] or rbenv [4] to install later versions of ruby on any of the distros. Brightbox also run a PPA of ruby packages for Ubuntu [5]
 
So we'd like to ask the community for feedback on our plan. If we drop support for ruby 1.8.7 after this release, is that going to pose a big problem for you, and if so, is there anything we could do to make this less of a problem? 
 
Cheers

Louise 
 
[1] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2014/07/01/eol-for-1-8-7-and-1-9-2/
 
[2] precise - until 2017, squeeze - until 2016, wheezy - for at least another year after the next stable release.
 
[3] https://rvm.io/
 
[4] https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv
 
[5] https://www.brightbox.com/docs/ruby/ubuntu/

[James McKinney]

To no one’s surprise, I’m +1 on dropping 1.8.7 :)

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[Andrei Cristian Petcu]

Hi,

I think rbenv is better than rvm.

From what I know rvm changes some system commands like "cp", just like a
rootkit :D rbenv is easy to use, you just need to put it in the $PATH
before the system ruby for all affected users.

I think it's simple to support both but I prefer rbenv.

Andrei

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[Caleb Tutty]

Just a note that official support for 1.9.3 has also ended (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/02/23/support-for-ruby-1-9-3-has-ended/).

I've been running Alaveteli under Ruby 2.1 with success.

Unfortunately there is a circular dependency bug in ActiveSupport 3.2.x (https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/18201) under Ruby 2.2 which won't be fixed because Rails 3.2.x has also passed end of life.

I would be in favour of dropping 1.8.7 support.

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