What version of Ruby should we recommend?
After a recent discussion we agreed that the rdoc (readme.rb) should read:
Best is to use Ruby 1.8.2-14 or later.
However, if you are using the Watir::IE#modal_dialog method, you must
use Ruby 1.8.2-14 and not a more recent version.
Watir (in general) will not work with Ruby 1.8.1-13. (This version of
Ruby has a bad WIN32OLE library.)
I revised this recommendation to this thus in the new (unpublished) website:
First you need to "install
Ruby":http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167 using
the one-click installer for Windows.
*We recommend Ruby 1.8.2-14 or later.*
However, if you wish to use Watir's support for the *IE web modal
dialog*
then you "must use Ruby
1.8.2-14":http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Installation
and not a more recent version. This dialog is
posted with the showModalDialog() JavaScript command and is
supported with Watir's
ie.modal_dialog command.
However, the wiki page for installing recommends 1.8.2-14 for everyone.
http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Install+Ruby
I was surprised when i found this and started a discussion with Zeljko
on the page, but thought the issue might be of more general interest.
Personally, i think that people should be using the latest generally
available version of Ruby. There continue to be improvements with it.
For example I recently reported several Ruby bugs that interfered with
integrating Watir with Cruise Control.
http://www.io.com/~wazmo/blog/archives/2007_04.html. At this point, we
see problems in both 1.8.5 and 1.8.6, but expect that 1.8.7 will have
these problems fixed and will be encouraging a move there when it happens.
Should our recommendation for newer versions of Ruby be more emphatic?
Another question regards the modal dialog support. I don't know if the
community understands that at this point i am abandoning this
functionality. I would love to see someone take it over and make it so
that it was dependent on a specific version of Ruby. But i don't expect
that to happen. But we can't allow this to say that all users should
stick with 1.8.2 until the end of time.
For example, rubygems in 1.8.2 does not support the --install-depencies
argument, which makes installing via gem much more complicated (esp.
when i publish the gem to rubyforge.org). So once this is done, i will
probably be telling people NOT to use 1.8.2, because i think it is more
important to make our install instructions simple. We can have alternate
instructions for the people who need the modal_dialog support.
I'd appreciate your thoughts and questions.
Bret
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