Misc #13659: Keeping track of officially supported versions by the ruby bindings in the core/stdlib

• Status: Third Party's Issue
• Assignee: -

[shevegen (Robert A. Heiler)]

Hello ruby core-team and others,

Would it be possible to keep track of the versions that are officially supported
by ruby bindings, for a particular binding?

For example, let's compare openssl-1.0.2k and openssl-1.1.0f. Perhaps a new openssl
version will emerge in a year or so, just for sake of demonstration purpose, let's
call it openssl-1.2.0.

Right now there is no easy way that I am aware about, for a ruby user to know whether
his ruby version supports all these openssl versions or not.

My suggestion would be to add this information somewhere. Perhaps in the .gemspec
file itself (Hiroshi Shibata added many .gemspec files for the official ruby
distribution, e. g. openssl here at https://github.com/ruby/openssl/blob/master/openssl.gemspec
and others).

Once this information is stored, it could also be programmatically obtained
and displayed on the official ruby docu. (By the way on a side note,
the ruby docu for openssl at:

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.1/libdoc/openssl/rdoc/OpenSSL.html

The rdoc parser seems to not filter away the "frozen_string_literal: false" parts, which
oddly enough appear on the current page and should perhaps not appear there, but this is
a side issue, a minor glitch. I just report it here in the event that someone wants
to fix this minor annoyance.)

If this information would be stored, then it could be also displayed on
the OpenSSL.html page for ruby, aka which versions are officially supported
with a given ruby version.

I suggest this specifically for openssl because I actually had difficulties
with openssl-1.1.0f so I downgraded to 1.0.2k and ruby is happy again. But
I do not know if my ruby supports 1.1.0f, or whether I have made a mistake.

If this information would be stored somewhere, then I could instantly look
at it and say "aha, this openssl version is supported" or I could say "aha,
this openssl version is NOT supported". I hope you can understand what I mean
here. :)

I suggest this for openssl but it could actually be used for ALL the bindings
in ruby, that we can keep track of which versions are officially supported.

Perhaps it could be written into the .gemspec file itself, or perhaps into
another file. I do not know. Either way I think that it is better to somewhere
keep track of this information, which then allows people to quickly see
whether a particular version is already supported by the particular ruby
bindings or not, e. g. also zlib, readline etc... and any other bindings
that are officially bundled into a ruby tarball/archive release.

I hope I could explain my suggestion. I filed it under Misc because it
is most definitely not a bug, and also not directly a feature within
ruby itself, more like documentation or so.

Thank you for reading!

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

Note: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/trunk/OpenSSL.html (our official documentation) is not affect "frozen_string_literal: false" parts

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Status changed from Open to Third Party's Issue

Please report it at https://github.com/ruby/openssl