Could you please consider adding ruby2.3 currently in testing to
jessie-backports as well?
Unfortunately that is not viable, for a few reasons:
- whenever we add a new version of ruby we need to rebuild all packages
with native extensions, and that is clearly not something we can
responsibly do in the backports repository.
- introducing a new ruby interpreter might break several end-user
packages that depend on ruby, say chef, puppet, vagrant, redmine, etc
etc. when introducing a new interpreter on unstable, we often need to
fix quite a bit of incompatibilities, which is OK for a development
distro, but not OK for a stable one (and therefore not OK for
backports).
This is not the first time this is requested, and I do sympathize with
your use case. In theory it could be doable but making it right would
require an enormous amount of testing, for which I don't have the time.
What you can do, is rebuild the ruby2.3 package on jessie, which should
"just work", and then create symlinks like /usr/local/bin/ruby ->
/usr/bin/ruby2.3 etc.