Today marks 34 days since I wrote my post on Ruby 1.9.1. That has been the single most successful piece I have ever written and I’d like to thank those people who linked to it and those who have commented on it.
Now I must ask something of the community. We have this wonderful new version of Ruby to use and yet many of the gems we love to use are still broken. Why? Because the owners of the gems are lazy or simply cannot be bothered or do not want to spend the time to alter their gems to make them compatible with Ruby 1.9.. There have been a few authors out there such as the Phusion Passenger guys (look how small that commit is!) who have added 1.9 compatibility to their gem and this is a show of how important they think the community is to the success of their product. They *want the community to use 1.9 with their gem.
This is a call to action for those developers who have failed to release a 1.9 compatible version of their gem for some reason. There is no excuse. If you can’t do it, get someone else to do it. There’s this awesome service called github which is really handy when you want to share a project with the world and get people to submit stuff. If you don’t want to fix your gem, then fine. Other people will, in time. Hell, even I might fire up a few new repositories when things settle down with 1.9 compatibility for your hard work (and of course attempt to get my changes put back into mainstream). Who knows, I might even find fame through this!
Please, please, please! Update your gems. It’s not that hard and it’s setting the Ruby community on the path to full compatibility with 1.9. We don’t want to become like Internet Explorer.