Do you guys (or know of any users) stuck on Ruby 1.8.5 or earlier?
I know some users on RHEL/CentOS 5 have 1.8.5 installed as /usr/bin/ruby
by default and RHEL/CentOS 5.x will continue to be deployed for many
years to come. This is the unfortunate reality of distributions with
long-term support (and Ruby being a rapidly evolving ecosystem).
Feel free to email me privately, too, running old versions could
be risky and admitting to it could open you up to security issues
(or at least embarrassment :))
Fwiw, I know (and help ensure) Ruby 1.9.3 builds/runs well on
CentOS 5.x. And anybody (on *nix) capable of _running_ Ruby 1.8.x
should have little trouble building the latest 1.9.3 tarball.
This isn''t a project which targets 20 year-old i486 systems, so
upgrading the distro/compiler is extremely time-consuming and
nearly impossible for some folks.