It's not a Ubuntu decision, its a Debian decision. It's to maintain backwards-comparability, at least until 1.8.7 is end of lifed in June 2012 (for normal bugfixes) and then in June 2013 when security fixes stop (so at time of updating, it is already EOLed). source and source2
You can install ruby 1.9.2 via the ruby1.9.1 package, so its not really that big of a deal - you can also setup a alias so /usr/bin/ruby will run /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1. (or one of the many other options out there)
It's not a Ubuntu decision, its a Debian decision. It's to maintain backwards-comparability, at least until 1.8.7 is end of lifed in June 2012 (for normal bugfixes) and then in June 2013 when security fixes stop (so at time of updating, it is already EOLed). source and source2
You can install ruby 1.9.2 via the
ruby1.9.1
package, so its not really that big of a deal - you can also setup a alias so/usr/bin/ruby
will run/usr/bin/ruby1.9.1
. (or one of the many other options out there)