What is the difference between the different Ruby 1.9 builds?

Question

Hello,

There are quite a few versions of Ruby 1.9 floating around. There are a few Ruby 1.9 builds for the different operating systems at the official Ruby language site here:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

There are also other 1.9 versions at Ruby Forge:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167&release_id=38052

What are the differences between them? And which one should one be learning?

I ask this because I started taking a Ruby course at http://rubylearning.com/ and they recommend downloading ruby 1.9.1p243 (2009-07-16 revision 24175) [i386-mingw32] but do not really state why. Also I see other people using different builds of 1.9 so I am curious about the differences.

Thanks,
caeious

Answer 1

There are three main versions of Ruby 1.9 on ruby-lang.org:

• Stable: this is the one that most people should be using, as it's the latest stable release
• Stable snapshot: this is the latest version of the development branch in SVN that has been marked as 'stable'. It's an unreleased version that's still being worked on, and should only be interesting to those wanting to test out the upcoming Ruby version.
• Daily snapshot: this is a snapshot of the development branch in SVN, taken every day. Should be pretty unstable, and only recommended to those wanting to develop Ruby itself.

For your Ruby course I'd definitely use the latest Stable release, so the recommendation you got seems about right.