RBEL ruby 1.9, 1.8+1.9 and what else

[rubiojr]

Howdy folks,

The transition to Ruby1.9 in RBEL is getting on my nerves :). I've
been investigating different approaches to fix the issue and all of
them have lots of benefits and drawbacks.

Here's the situation:

* RBEL needs to move to 1.9 at some point, like everybody else. Having
1.9 in RBEL is not the real issue here, as that's kind of easy but the
way rubygem packages are installed greatly depends on the ruby version
they were built against. There three different approaches here from
what I've seen so far. All of them take a 'decent' amount of work:

1. The Debian way: I believe they're building rubygem packages that
include both 1.9 and 1.8 gems (in case they're native). They've also
an alternatives mechanism to switch between ruby implementations
AFAIK. Need to investigate this further but looks like a really nice
and clean approach (probably the hardest to implement too).

2. Maintaining a rbel19.frameos.org repository: Packages will be the
same in this repo, but default ruby implementation will be 1.9 and all
the rubygem packages will be built against this stack.
Cons, will need to maintain two more repos (RHEL5/6) and will
break compatibility with CentOS/EPEL rubygems I believe.
Pros, easy to do not a lot of work, packages have the same names
so no new docs.
I do not feel very good with this approach due to compatibility
reasons.

3. Having parallel instalable ruby19 and rubygem19 packages and
provide some magic to switch between implementations/gemsets.

Still need some more research and experimentation but that's pretty
much what I came up with so far.

What's up with you guys? How do you feel the stuff? Comments,
suggestions?

Thanks!

[rubiojr]

Forgot to add some relevant links:

Lucas Nussbaum is one of the guys leading the effort in Debian I
believe:

http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby

Fedora relevant links:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Ruby_1.9
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ruby_SIG

I do not expect a lot of movement with regard to 1.9 in the RHEL camp,
so nothing to share.

If you have relevant stuff to share, please do so :).