Did you run the tests locally and do they pass? @hkmaly

Sorry. As I mentioned, they didn't. And by "didn't" I mean I had failures even on tests having nothing to do with the change: 103 runs, 155 assertions, 31 failures, 6 errors, 0 skips including some incorrect encoding and "undefined method `cleanup_tubes!" ... there must be something I did incorrectly or more problems with older ruby than just the ones related to slice.

Hmm okay, thanks for the update.