You may already know by now that a new version of Ruby, 1.9, has been announced as being available for download. However, if you’re not familiar with Ruby’s tradition, you might think that you should start upgrading all of your production servers today.
Do not do that.
Although Matz indicated in his announcement that 1.9 is a development release, Dave explains what this means. It is not a stable production release.
Ruby has a tradition of using odd-numbered releases for experimentation and development, and even-numbered releases for widespread public adoption. 1.9 has many cool things, and some subtle but significant changes to the Ruby language, so by all means download it, play with it, learn it, love it.
I just hope that by next Christmas we’ll all be downloading – and installing – 2.0.