Yes, we should (we must) have one sane default if we want to keep it
simple (packaging/installing/using), but who's saying that the actual
default is the best sane default to deliver in average? Who and how it
is decided?
It would seem to me that the standard ruby should be the default Ruby
installation. From here it is just a question of what version? What do
we have that still depends on Ruby 1.8? I think puppet had problems
with 1.9 for a while (and maybe it still does)... But what else? What
is preventing us from (or a better question may be "why haven't we" )
shipping 1.9 in parallel with 1.8? We've shipped python3 as an option
for a couple of Fedora releases now, it would seem to me that we
could/should be doing the same with Ruby.
Even Debian got this out the door before us, as Squeeze has ruby1.8 and
ruby 1.9 both available in their standard repos. So this isn't
unprecedented or infeasible.