• Plugins use deface < 1.0 at the moment, but >= 1.0 requires nokogiri ~> 1.6.0 which is incompatible with 1.8. We can then switch to deface 1.0 after dropping 1.8.

Debian 6 (squeeze) and Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) both use 1.8.7 as default, but Debian 6 will be EOL soon (May 2014) and 12.04 will be supplanted by 14.04 shortly.

They're able to switch to 1.9.2/3 by default, but both ship Ruby 1.9 versions that aren't supported by Puppet upstream, so doing this can't really be recommended.

It seems that using Debian 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 as our primary versions for these distros would be a good cue to begin dropping 1.8 support (maybe Foreman 1.6 or equivalent).

1.8 support will probably continue for the smart proxy and probably Hammer for longer, since they use the system Ruby 1.8.7 on EL6, rather than software collections.

The proxy has to load Puppet, which remains packaged for 1.8 (though they're talking about dropping support - how isn't clear, yet), while I think we used 1.8 for Hammer to reduce dependencies. Now SCL's released, using it for Hammer on EL6 might well be sensible.

Up for discussion again, possibly for Foreman 1.7: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/foreman-dev/p48T8bQ21hY

Debian 6 has been deprecated as of 1.6, and will be dropped for 1.7. #7227 tracks how to handle Ubuntu 12.04.