Remove support for Ruby < 2.1?

[ruckus]

I noticed that Nokogiri 1.7+ requires Ruby >= 2.1.

Is it safe to assume that support for Ruby 1.9.3 & 2.0.0 can be removed?

One proxy for the usage of those versions is captured in this blog post by ScoutApp:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2017/01/09/state-of-the-2017-rails-stack

[drewish]

The fact that Rails 3.2 got support for Ruby 2.2 definitely lessens the need to support older versions of Ruby. Is there something to encourage you to drop the old versions? IMHO now that bundler can sanely account for the current Ruby version when computing dependencies there's less of a need to drop support for old versions.

[ruckus]

It came up because I was re-installing development gems and I had nokogiri unbound to a version - so it installed the latest (1.7.0.1) and that included a note about this version only supporting Ruby >= 2.1

The solution at this moment would be to lock it to <= 1.6.8.1 according to the Nokogiri CHANGELOG they're dropping support for older versions:

https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

So my next thought was that if Nokogiri is pretty aggressive about deprecating support for older Rubies and assuming that everyone and their brother uses Nokogiri- perhaps we should consider deprecation as well.

But you're right in that its not a problem per-se (keeping support for Ruby <= 2.1 is not a hindrance) as you noted with support via Bundler..

So I think the takeaway is to just specify a Nokogiri version of 1.6.8.1 at:

https://github.com/ruckus/quickbooks-ruby/blob/master/quickbooks-ruby.gemspec#L19

[drewish]

A year later, now that Ruby 2.2 is unsupported and 2.3 will become unsupported in March it seems like a reasonable time to start looking at versions to deprecate. Maybe not try to actively break them but stop testing and let folks just stick with the older version if they need to stay on old Ruby.