Posted by zzak on 17 Dec 2013
Effective immediately, 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 will be supported for security patches until June 2014.
- Terence Lee (@hone02) and Zachary Scott (@_zzak) will assume maintainership.
- After the 6 month maintenance period, we can add more committers to extend another 6 months.
This maintenance extension is made possible by Heroku, see their blog post A Patch in Time: Securing Ruby for more information.
Reporting issues
During this extended maintenance period we will only apply security patches to the source code repository for 1.8.7 and 1.9.2.
We take security very seriously, if you find a vulnerability please report it to security@ruby-lang.org immediately. This mailing list is private and reported problems will be published after a fix is released.
Please see ruby-lang.org/en/security for more information.
On Release Management
As I mentioned above, we will only be applying security patches and incrementing the patch level.
We will not be releasing a patched version of 1.8.7 or 1.9.2 to ruby-lang.org. However, you are free to repackage binaries from source.
Reason being, we don’t want any new tickets, as an official release will result in continued responsibility of ruby-core to follow up on maintenance. Our team resources are already low, and we want to encourage upgrades, not support outdated versions.
Why resurrect 1.8.7?
You may remember an announcement approximately 6 months ago that sunset 1.8.7.
While ruby-core will no longer resume maintenance of 1.8.7 or 1.9.2, Terence and Zachary will support these versions for security maintenance as part of a corporate sponsorship.
In the past we have supported vendors who wish to maintain legacy versions. In 2009 the maintenance of Ruby 1.8.6 was transferred to Engine Yard when they released 1.8.6-p369.
Words of encouragement
We would like to take this chance to strongly encourage you to upgrade to a supported version of Ruby as soon as possible. Many ruby-core members have put countless hours into improving the performance and features of Ruby in 2.0+ and we wish you would take advantage of it.
Thank you for your continued support and lets keep making Ruby better!