FYI: transient dependency on `erb` means that `debug` no longer installs on Ruby < 3.2

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
ruby
Domain
devtools

Research direction

Start with the Ruby version requirement in debug.gemspec and the supported versions listed in README.md. Reproduce installation on Ruby 3.1 and inspect the dependency chain through irb, rdoc, and erb. Done should mean either supported Ruby versions install successfully or the support claims and CI coverage are updated to match.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Your environment

  • ruby -v: ruby 3.1.7p261 (2025-03-26 revision 0a3704f218) [x86_64-linux]

Describe the bug

I noticed in this dependabot PR, that CI was failing to install debug in Ruby 3.1.

debug relies on irb, which relies on rdoc which relies on erb, which dropped support for Ruby < 3.2:

erb-5.0.1 requires ruby version >= 3.2.0, which is incompatible with the current
version, 3.1.7

debug claims to support Ruby back to 2.7 (here and here), but currently can't be installed on those.

To Reproduce

  • Within Ruby <3.2, try to install debug

Expected behavior

  • If it's a supported Ruby version, then installing debug should work fine.
    • And perhaps debug should have a CI run using these old versions to show that it continues to work.

Additional context

I know that this isn't under your direct control, so I'm not sure which would be the best way to handle this.

This is really just an FYI. In my case, I'll probably drop support for 3.1 myself, and so I will no longer attempt to install debug on it.

Dominant language
Ruby
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