2023-03-01 20:46:05 +01:00
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---
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title: Dropping Support For Old Ruby Versions
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author: Natalie Weizenbaum
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2023-03-03 16:39:31 +01:00
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date: 2016-02-29 14:25:00 -8
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2023-03-01 20:46:05 +01:00
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---
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As of version 3.5, Ruby Sass will drop support for Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.3. We
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will continue to support Ruby 2.0.0 and higher.
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Ruby 1.8.7 was retired by the Ruby maintainers in [June
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2013](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2013/06/30/we-retire-1-8-7/), and Ruby
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1.9.3 was retired in [February
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2015](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/02/23/support-for-ruby-1-9-3-has-ended/).
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Despite that, we continued to maintain support for older versions because Ruby
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1.8.7 was installed by default on Mac OS X through Mountain Lion (which was
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released in July 2012).
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There are many users of Sass who aren't independently users of Ruby. We wanted
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to minimize the amount of work these users need to do to use Sass, which means
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letting it run on their machine without also requiring them to install a new
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language.
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That decision wasn't without costs, though. Most seriously, recent versions of
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the [listen package](https://github.com/guard/listen) didn't support older Ruby
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versions, and older versions of RubyGems weren't clever enough to avoid
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downloading them on incompatible Ruby versions. To work around this, we bundled
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an older version of `listen` with Sass and used it for users who didn't have a
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compatible version installed elsewhere, but this produced constant compatibility
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headaches.
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These headaches led us to reevaluate our policy for supporting older Ruby
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versions. We still cared a lot about users' built-in Ruby versions, but we
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couldn't support them forever. We needed a way to determine when the benefit of
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dropping support outweighed the costs.
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We decided to use the analytics data for sass-lang.com to approximate the
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proportion of our user base that was still using operating systems that shipped
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with old Ruby versions. Before we looked at the data, we decided that we would
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drop support for a Ruby version if it had been retired by the Ruby maintainers,
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_and_ less than 2% of our visitors across the previous month were using an OS
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that shipped it by default.
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Once we did that, we looked at the data. 34.3% of our visitors were using OS X,
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and 1.4% of OS X users were using Mountain Lion or earlier. We were clearly able
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to drop support for 1.8.7. In addition, 1.9.3 was never shipped with OS X so we
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were able to drop it as well. Ruby 2.0.0, despite retired [last
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week](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2016/02/24/support-plan-of-ruby-2-0-0-and-2-1/),
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was shipped with the most recent OS X version—we won't be dropping support for
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it any time soon.
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<img class="center" src="/assets/img/blog/006-sass-visitors.png" alt="sass-lang.com visitors by operating system">
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For Sass 3.4, we're just planning on printing deprecation messages for users of
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deprecated Ruby versions. But once 3.5 releases, support will be fully dropped
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and we'll switch to using `listen` as a proper gem dependency. If you're on an
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older version of OS X and you haven't upgraded your Ruby version, there are some
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simple instructions [on the Ruby
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site](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/installation/#homebrew) for how
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to do so easily using Homebrew.
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