Upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6

I am still unsure as to why DreamHost is using Ruby 1.8.5, but I would think it should be fixed ASAP. merb requires at least 1.8.6 to run, and since we can't use custom versions of ruby in conjuction with mod_rack (Passenger) those of us who want to use merb are pretty much crap out of luck. For a hosting company who whines about the performance of rails you're a little slow on getting support for other frameworks running.

We like to stick with what Debian provides as much as we can ... less work for us and more stability for you.

That said, they do have a backport (less official, but newer) package for ruby 1.8.7 now and we can test that out on your server. Send in a support message asking to be passed to me (reference this thread) and I can help you out.




- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

Fair enough, support request sent. I can understand why you'd want to stick with what debian provides, package managment is a wonderful thing and hackish hosts that compile software themselves just to get stuff working tend being highly unreliable :/

Yeah, we do package up a lot of stuff ourselves, too, but we try to avoid it. We did Ruby 1.8.5 ourselves for the older Debian Sarge, for instance.

Anyway, I think it should be no problem for us to go to Ruby 1.8.7 on Debian Etch using backports.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

Thanks for these tips. It was great to find out that requesting a move to the new servers gave me the upgrade to Ruby 1.8.7. It seems that Ruby 1.8.7 is now standard with the new servers so I didn't need to ask for any more assistance (no backports required).

I've successfully installed Merb 1.0 on DreamHost with Passenger.

You can see my installation notes at
http://yaxgod.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/installing-merb-10-at-dreamhost/.

That writeup is really helpful. Thanks for doing that!

Now that Passenger handles more than just Ruby on Rails we should at least update our documentation to be more clear. We can probably make some changes to make the setup process a bit less annoying, too.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

I've written an entry for the DreamHost support wiki that gives detailed instructions for installing Merb 1.0 at DreamHost:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Merb