_ Ruby 1.8.6.230

There are some "incompatibilities" between Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, especially for third party libraries. For example, libxml-ruby1.8 may crash more often. This case is due to libxml-ruby1.8, not Ruby. The library is doing a wrong way: allocating a new object during GC. As of Ruby 1.8.7, it friendly checks and reports that error. Anyway, from users' point of view, it would be "incompatible."

Since I need Ruby 1.8.6.230 right now, I have built it. I think that some people also want it. i386 and amd64 binaries that I can make are available here. Note that I will not keep on releasing 1.8.6 series. You soon have to prepare for 1.8.7 or keep on staying in Etch (1.8.5).

 deb     http://debian.sgtpepper.net/ sid main
 deb-src http://debian.sgtpepper.net/ sid main

Add the lines above into /etc/apt/sources. Then,

 $ sudo aptitude update
 $ sudo aptitude install ruby1.8=1.8.6.230-1