Why Ruby on Rails isn’t ready for Ruby 1.9.x

I’ve spend the better part of the last two weeks dealing with upgrading my operating system to Snow Leopard. Honestly, I haven’t seen much difference, but I believe that there is an improvement. Things just feel faster.

One of the big changes I was going to make was moving all my development to ruby 1.9.1, since it’s now the preferred ruby as stated by ruby-lang.org.

I was able to install it, add gems and such based on various tutorials I read on the net. My problem started as soon as I tried to deal with rails 2.3.4 and textmate. Time after time, I tried to run tests, and ended up with the same issue.

invalid multibyte character

Here’s a test for you. Fire up an irb shell using ruby 1.9.1.

irb
control      = %Q|\x00-\x1f\x7f-\xff|
CONTROL_CHAR  = /[#{control}]/n

The next thing you should see is:

ArgumentError: invalid multibyte character
	from (irb):2
	from /usr/local/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'

Those two lines are taken from actionmailer-2.3.4/lib/action_mailer/vendor/tmail-1.2.3/tmail/utils.rb:115-117

That’s the tmail-1.2.3 that’s vendored in the gems used for rails. A few searches on the net and you find:

http://github.com/mikel/tmail

The first line of text in the readme?
Note… as of 1.2.5, TMail is not compatible with Ruby 1.9.1.

Huh.

So, my guess is, anyone who’s using rails with ruby 1.9.1 has just been getting lucky up to this point. I was not so lucky, and that’s why I’ve moved back to ruby 1.8.7. I’m a lot happier right now.