Ruby 1.8.4 preview3

I remember Matz releasing Ruby 1.8.2 last year for Christmas. At the time I was just starting out and showing my first interest towards Ruby and I remember going to Hodges Figgis in Dublin (where I used to live), and buying a copy of the Pickaxe. This is year there isn’t a third edition, and it’s early for the 2nd edition of The Ruby Way, but there is still the annual gift from Matz.

At this point, Matz can be considered a sort of Japanese Santa Claus for all us grown-up geek children ;-). Ruby 1.8.4 will be released for Christmas, but as I used to do when I was a child, I opened my gifts before hand. I installed the Ruby 1.8.4 preview 3 and I invite you to do the same. I think that it’s important to contribute to the community, especially when it comes to helping to test the latest versions, and therefore being in a position to send bug reports (I am going to install the 1.9 soon). So far it’s working like a charm… I installed it without encountering any problems, gems, Ruby on Rails, and YAML work all fine (there were a few issues introduced with Ruby 1.8.3).

s usual to install on *nix systems:

% tar xzvf ruby-1.8.4-preview3.tar.gz
% cd ruby-1.8.4
% ./configure
% make
% make install

To run all the default tests:

% make test-all

To verify that Ruby 1.8.4 is in the Path:

% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-22) [i686-linux])

The output on your computer maybe slightly different, just check that the first part of the output is ruby 1.8.4(2005-12-22).

To check that YAML works correctly:

% ruby -ryaml -e ‘y({:foo => “bar”})’

—
:foo: bar