Coming soon: rvm get stable

Coming soon to an RVM near you:

rvm get stable

Why?

The goal of the RVM project has always been giving its users the best experience. The project strives to take care of everything possible in managing Ruby environments so that users can focus on getting their work done without having to know or worry about how to manage their rubies and environments beyond the RVM commands.

There is one major issue preventing RVM from reaching this goal. In order to get the latest and greatest from RVM you run the (very amusing) command:

rvm get head

This gets the latest git head version which has all of the latest commits from the rvm repository. While this does get you all of the latest bugfixes, unfortunately, it also means you get all of the latest regressions from new features as well.

Engine Yard sponsors Rubinius and JRuby. In order to facilitate the best user experience possible for our users, RVM must be guarded against such regressions. Adding this concept of “get stable” gives us releases that are tested for the various regressions and bugs that have been introduced in the past. This goal of the stable release is to feature consistency, upgrading from one stable release to the next must ensure that we have no regressions. Put more succinctly, what was working still works as expected after getting the latest stable release.

Fortunately, the creator of RVM, Wayne E. Seguin, works for me at Engine Yard and so you might think I could go to him and say something like, “Hey Wayne, stop shipping regressions in RVM. Can you instead release stable versions, please?”

And you’d be correct, I did this.

Unfortunately, his response was “Between my awesome day job at Engine Yard, my family time and my SM Framework Project, I have no time left to focus on this.”

Sadness ensues.

Fortunately, another RVM contributor has stepped up to help Wayne with the RVM project! Enter Michal Papis, a good friend of Engine Yard (who is already building a secret project with us!)

It is with great excitement that I announce Michal Papis will take on the esteemed role of RVM Release Manager. We’re happy to offer Michal an Engine Yard Open Source Grant to sponsor his part-time work on the RVM project.

Michal’s first task to tackle is to support the following new method for getting the latest, stable RVM release:

rvm get stable

We love anything that makes it easy for people to find, install, learn and use Ruby. For thousands of Ruby users, RVM is the only way to get the latest MRI, Rubinius, JRuby, Maglev and MacRuby. Thanks to Michal Papis in advance for making RVM stable and sumptuous.