I forked off trunk 2 days ago. It's possible to have 2 different gems, but this is not very common in the Ruby world. Because Ruby 1.8 is not maintained anymore, not even for security issues, most people have moved on to newer versions. This is in contrast with Python 2, which is still maintained and heavily used.
My preference would be to document that the last release of avro that supports Ruby 1.8 is 1.7.5. (Version 1.7.6 won't install because of the multi_json issue). Maintaining 1.8 compatibility will be harder and harder over time and hold back development. E.g. it is already hard to even install a Ruby 1.8 version on a recent OSX due to compiler changes. Cheers, Willem On Jun 25, 2014, at 5:06 AM, Sean Busbey <[email protected]> wrote: > how far back did you fork? > > could we have a Ruby 1.8 gem and a Ruby 1.9+ gem? > > we have python and python 3 support broken out, for example. > > > On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 3:51 AM, Willem van Bergen <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> For a Ruby project, I am using AVRO schemas to validate Ruby objects. >> Because I ran into some issues with the official avro gem, so I forked it: >> https://github.com/wvanbergen/tros. (The name probably only makes sense >> to Dutch people :) >> >> >> ### Changes >> >> - Fixed a round trip encoding issue for union(double, int) types. >> Integers were being encoded as floats, and read back as float. In Ruby >> versions 2.0 and later, a float == bigint equality check will return false. >> This caused a test to fail. >> >> - Fix UTF-8 support for Ruby 1.9+, and JRuby. >> The original code was written for Ruby 1.8, and there's some big changes >> to how to properly do this in Ruby 1.9+ and JRuby. >> >> - Remove monkey patching of Enumerable >> Monkey patching builtin objects is frowned upon, especially in libraries. >> Fixing it was easy: >> >> https://github.com/wvanbergen/tros/commit/c81d6189277111008ebb05239af91d286dd01061 >> >> - Dropped dependency of yajl-ruby and/or multi_json. >> The yajl-ruby dependency was causing compatibility issues with the rest of >> my application, and there's no released version yet with working multi_json >> (1.7.6 cannot be installed because multi_json is misspelled multi-json). >> Instead of fixing that, I decided to simply use Ruby's built in support for >> JSON. For libraries, the less external dependencies the better. >> >> >> I also did some heavy refactoring to make the Ruby codebase work outside >> of the context of the greater Avro project, and applied some best practices >> of the Ruby ecosystem. Finally, I set up CI ( >> https://travis-ci.org/wvanbergen/tros) that checks the gem on multiple >> Ruby versions. >> >> >> ### Contributing back? >> >> I would like to contribute back my changes if you are interested. However, >> maintaining Ruby 1.8 support will make this very hard. Ruby 1.8 doesn't >> come with built in JSON support, and it's unicode handling is severely >> broken. It is also no longer maintained: >> https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2013/12/17/maintenance-of-1-8-7-and-1-9-2/ >> >> Is it acceptable to drop support for Ruby 1.8? If so, I can work with you >> to get my changes back into the main codebase. >> >> >> Cheers, >> Willem van Bergen > > > > > -- > Sean
