Prepare for Ruby 1.8 end-of-life

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Ruby 1.8.7 support will end in June 2013.
There's Ruby 2.0 (which may bring new problems, with the GeoToad code itself, 
and the gems used to create the Windows installer).
An upcoming release should drop Ruby 1.8, and at least warn the user if she's 
using 2.0.

Side-effect of raising the barrier to 1.9 is full encoding support within Ruby, 
allowing to clean up some still open HTML <-> text conversion issues, and 
perhaps to add Korean and Japanese to the list of supported GC language 
settings.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Steve8x8 on 3 Jun 2013 at 1:29

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The change committed to branch as r1367 will exclude ruby 1.8 from the list of 
supported versions, so watch out!
This patch will be applied to the last stable 3.16 release, which will thus 
become 3.18 in a couple of weeks.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 10 Jun 2013 at 12:28

• Changed state: Started

[GoogleCodeExporter]

After releasing 3.16.8, with the EOL of ruby 1.8.7 in mind, all future versions 
will require ruby 1.9 (2.0 will enter testing when it's settled a bit).
This will eventually allow us to clean up the HTML conversion and encoding 
code, and address issue 176.
Even if a gc site change forces a maintenance release before 3.18.0 is declared 
stable, ruby 1.8 is gone. Time to say good-bye.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 27 Jun 2013 at 12:58

• Changed state: FixAvail

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Although some initial changes have been made to reject ruby < 1.9, there are 
several places which need rewriting, in particular "yesterday"/"today" patterns.
Magic comments (forcing the interpreter to read source code as UTF-8) would be 
a good idea as well.
Changing the status from FixAvail to Started as work isn't complete yet.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 24 Aug 2013 at 1:03

• Changed state: Started

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Requests from #3 above have been merged into what's now 3.17.11 (a pre-release 
for 3.18.0). Ruby 1.8 is no longer supported, and patterns have been converted 
to UTF-8 - which even allowed inclusion of Korean and Japanese (will Hebrew be 
next? Lao? Amharic?)

The Debian Dependencies had to be modified. Please notify me if there are 
problems - I know that for Squeeze there's no "alternatives" mechanism for ruby 
(for Wheezy, there is). Ubuntu, with it's much too frequent updates, I cannot 
follow too closely.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 12 Sep 2013 at 11:48

• Changed state: FixAvail

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 24 Sep 2013 at 10:04

• Changed state: Fixed