Ruby Standard Gems

Thursday, 9 January, 2020 — ruby development

At work, I’m upgrading my team’s Rails application from Ruby 2.5 to 2.6. In the course of tracking down test failures between the two versions, I’ve found the following site helpful: stdgems.org/.

In short, it describes the gems that are shipped with Ruby and the versions that shipped with each version, which is helpful in tracking down behavior changes that might not be described by the language changes themselves.

In a case specifically relevant to how the application handles invalidly formatted CSV files, I learned that for the CSV gem, Ruby 2.5 shipped with version 1.0 while version 3.0, started shipping with the 2.6 series. That detail was helpful in determining that the way we structured the test for a failing case was no longer going to work, and I needed to restructure the test. Yay!