I understand Lucas' decision, however it leaves some worrying questions about the state of ruby on Debian systems. Despite the rumours, the ruby1.8, ruby1.9 an

I understand Lucas' decision, however it leaves some worrying questions about the state of ruby on Debian systems. Despite the rumours, the ruby1.8, ruby1.9 and rubygems packages are are excellent shape thanks to the hard work by Lucas, Diago and Akira. There were consistent fundamental workflow clashes between upstream and the Debian packagers that have made their job exceedingly difficult. These clashes aren't malicious or antagonistic, they're just the meeting of two very different communities with very different priorities. To name a few of the clashes: API changes in minor releases, effective forking of rubygems by copying it into the 1.9 tree, opaque decision making (mostly due to the language barrier), allowing installed programs (ie rubygems) to update themselves and expectations on what is allowed in /usr/bin. I'm not saying either community is necessarily correct on these issues, just that they add up to some pretty big differences for debian-ruby to navigate. I use the Debian packages for ruby1.8, 1.9.2, jruby and rubygems in both my development and production environments. I've found them stable, rapidly updated in response to security issues and predictable. Lucas - thanks for your efforts, they will be missed.