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Ruby 1.9 Roundup: State Of i18n and Unicode, Feature Freeze for 1.9.1, Gems 1.3

by Werner Schuster on Sep 30, 2008 |

Character encodings and Unicode have long been reason for discussions in the Ruby space. Unlike languages like Java, Ruby does not use Unicode for strings internally. Unicode doesn't support all scripts and characters, eg for Asian languages, so local encodings are still necessary.
Tim Bray notes a new change in the Ruby 1.9.x trunk - Matz has now added String#each_codepoint, as a result of a lengthy discussion on ruby-core. String#each_codepoint allows to iterate over every codepoint in a string object.

String#each_codepoint is one of the features to appear in future 1.9.x versions, such as 1.9.1 which is scheduled to be released in December 2008. The feature freeze for 1.9.1 was on 25th September. Ruby 1.9.0-5, the next milestone before the release candidates is on the way and should be released soon (All changes in the Ruby 1.9.x trunk).

One of the latest changes is Ruby Gems 1.3, which was included just before the feature freeze. Ruby Gems 1.3 has also just been released for Ruby 1.8.x. The major changes in Gems 1.3:

* RubyGems doesn't print LOCAL/REMOTE titles for `gem query` and friends if stdout is not a TTY, except with --both
* Added Gem.find_files, allows a gem to discover features provided by other gems.
* Added pre/post (un)install hooks for packagers of RubyGems. (Not for gem themselves).
* RubyGems now installs gems into ~/.gem if GEM_HOME is not writable. Use --no-user-install command-line switch to disable this behavior.
* Fetching specs for update now uses If-Modified-Since requests.
* RubyGems now updates the ri cache when the rdoc gem is installed and documentation is generated.