Remove 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 support

[brandur]

1.8.7 was officially retired on June 30th, 2013 1 (over two years ago). Heroku helped out with an extended maintenance period to give people a little more breathing room, but even that ended on July 31st, 2014 2 (about 14 months ago).

Using Ruby 1.8.7 is no longer safe, and we probably shouldn't be encouraging its use. Lets consider removing it from our official support and Travis.

/cc @kyleconroy @russelldavis @mmcgrana Any thoughts on this one?

[brandur]

(And let's put 1.9.2 on this retirement list while we're at it. Extended support also ended 14 months ago.)

[kyleconroy]

We actually don't know how many people are using Ruby 1.8.7 or 1.9.2. I have a PR that adds that information to the log, but I forgot to merge it :( I'll try to get it out today.

[russelldavis]

Since we talked about #313 being a breaking change and warranting a major version bump, how about doing this along with that? (Pending reasonably low usage numbers.)

[brandur]

+1. Thanks for the input guys!

Just as a last follow-up: IMO, we may want to consider being a little proactive on this one even if there is still some usage of these older versions. They're way out maintenance and not getting security patches or anything anymore. It's probably in everyone's best interest for us to help discourage their use.

[kyleconroy]

I'm also okay with removing support for 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 and calling that a major version bump.

[brandur]

Alright, will keep these on life support for now.

Closing this issue, but may open it again if these old versions cause more trouble.

[brandur]

Just wanted to document that I ended up having to add some pretty nasty hacks to the test suite in order to keep the 1.8.7 tests running (see ca8b49e and 77b1972). Can't drop this stuff quickly enough.

[brandur]

And here's another hack: b4600aa

It turns out the 1.8.7 tests had been stable mostly by a lucky run that lasted for a few weeks. When I pushed a branch this morning, they randomly broke.

The above hack fixed the problem, but as seen in #333, every time I do this, there's a risk of introducing bugs in other versions. I think this is yet another indicator that the cost of maintaining these versions is too high.