Why is Ruby 1.8.6 RC1 more recent than Ruby 1.8.6 Final?

Question

Getting to the Ruby One-click installer for Windows, we may go to

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

and then

http://rubyinstaller.org/download.html

however over there, it seems that

Ruby 1.8.6 RC1 (patchlevel 383)

is actually more recent than

Ruby 1.8.6 RC2 (patchlevel 27)

or

Ruby 1.8.6 Final (patchlevel 26)

If I install them on different machines, the RC1 actually shows a more recent date than RC2 or Final, by using

ruby -v

What's the rule? Does it go strictly by patchlevel? That is, the patchlevel decides how update it is, instead of whether it is RC1, RC2, or Final?

Answer 1

The RC numbers are release candidate numbers of the installer (and any Win32 modifications of Ruby, but I think those are all upstream). Ruby's own version number is 1.8.6 + the patchlevel.

Answer 2

Hello,

Ruby-Lang website advertise a package of Ruby for Windows called One-Click Installer.

That installer used to have their own version schema, as you note with 186-26 or 186-27 RC2

On RubyForge website (news section) you will find that efforts of the project as moved towards newer RubyInstaller packages, and is indicated there and the RubyInstaller download page that 186-27 RC2 is part of the legacy versions.

Latest RubyInstaller (currently in Release Candidate attempts) provide information of the correct Ruby version that includes and install, as indicated by the version string 1.8.6-p383 which is patchlevel 383 of Ruby.

Please note that you're comparing different type of packages. One-Click Installer versus RubyInstaller.

You can read more about this in the wiki and the latest announcement at RubyForge

Hope this answer your questions.