Latest ruby breaks BigDecimal and is unusable. Run this program: #!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'bigdecimal' expect = "0.34409E3" result = BigDecimal.new("344.09").to_s system 'rpm -q ruby' puts "expect: #{expect}" puts "result: #{result}" if expect == result puts "Okay" else puts "Failed" end Results before yum update: ruby-1.8.5-5.el5_2.6 expect: 0.34409E3 result: 0.34409E3 Okay Results after yum update: ruby-1.8.5-5.el5_3.7 expect: 0.34409E3 result: 0.3449E3 Failed The only workaround is to install ruby from source.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 510277 ***