Ruby 2.0.0 p195 and [-p247]?

Question

just a quick question, I am upgrading from Ruby 1.8.7 to 2.0.0 but looking in terminal I see:

[ruby-]1.8.6[-p420]
[ruby-]1.8.7[-p374]
[ruby-]1.9.1[-p431]
[ruby-]1.9.2[-p320]
[ruby-]1.9.3[-p448]
[ruby-]2.0.0-p195
[ruby-]2.0.0[-p247]
[ruby-]2.0.0-head

What do the numbers at the end mean (p448, p195, p247, head...etc) does it matter which I install? Thanks for the help. I'm still new to Ruby.

Answer 1

The Ruby versioning scheme goes Major.Minor.Tiny So, in 1.9.3, Major = 1, Minor = 9, Tiny = 3. The "pxxx" behind it stands for the specific build number of "Patch Level." The higher the number, the more recent the patch. If a security breach is found in Ruby, you will see the Ruby team push out a patch. You will do wise to keep your Ruby version at the highest patched version.

The "Head" at the end of the last item is the most recent version of the development branch of Ruby. I would recommend against this unless you are needing to test against the newest changes. This gives you the option of pulling down version 2.1.0 even though it has not been released yet (at the time of this writing).

For detailed information about "Head" and other features in RVM when it comes to installing versions of Ruby, see RVM's Installing Ruby Page

Also note that you can always see what the most recent trunk of Ruby is in the version.h of the source code.