November 30, 2009: Rails 2.3.5 has just been released. I upgrade my production Rails apps and rock on.
February 17 of this year: RubyGems 1.3.6 is released and my apps begin suffering from deprecation warnings. They’re all over the place: when I run a test, when I launch script/console… when I sneeze.
/Users/pelargir/Projects/teascript/config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/rails/gem_dependency.rb:119:Warning: Gem::Dependency#version_requirements is deprecated and will be removed on or after August 2010. Use #requirement
Rumor has it the deprecation warning will go away with 2.3.6. And 2.3.6 is expected to drop any day. Yay! Problem will be solved soon… or so I thought. I begin waiting.
May 23: 2.3.6 finally drops.
May 24: 2.3.7 drops because of a bug in 2.3.6. What the heck?
May 25: 2.3.8 drops because of a bug in 2.3.7. Okay, this is getting crazy.
Was anyone else embarrassed about the 6-month delay for 2.3.6 followed by two more point releases over the span of three days? This is exactly the kind of anecdote an exec at a Fortune 500 would raise to prevent a move towards Rails and keep the company locked into Java or .NET for another decade. Ugh.
We can do better than this.
I beg to differ, I would say that we are agile, mistakes are human, but we identify and solve them, fast.
“We” certainly can. For example *you* could test their code before they’re released. It’s open source remember? The core developers don’t have the capacity to test every single third party plugin out there, but you can easily help.
This is absolutely unacceptable. Whoever is behind the wheel needs to slow down and check their work.
Seriously? I mean SERIOUSLY? Yes it was a bit awkward, but really – who the hell upgrades & pushes a new point or major framework release to production before going though proper testing? So, for a day or so you had an issue with a point release (or two) that were rapidly fixed by the community and all is finally well in the world.
People make mistakes. And, we are talking about a free software product that many men and women put their blood sweat & tears into so you can make money. I’m more embarrassed by the folks in the community complaining/calling this out. Now those old enough to remember Windows NT Service Pack 2 – that was embarrassing…
Too make matters worse, 2.3.8 has a pretty serious bug related to the XSS stuff that’s fixed for 2.3.9, but we don’t have a 2.3.9 yet:
https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/4755-xss-in-238-is-still-opt-in
We were trying to upgrade from 2.3.5 to get a to ActionMailer, but instead had to just patch the fix into 2.3.5 since this is a blocking bug for us. 🙁
I gotta agree that if a new version of something comes out, you don’t install it on anything live for days/weeks/months until it’s clear everything is sane.
And who cares what corporate dolts will think? Why should Rails, or any open source project, base it’s decisions on what people not on board will think? What matters is the people who do use it. It’s not a product, if new people use it or not is up to them. There is no need to adopt sucky policies to increase “market share,” because it’s simply available; not in a market.
@RubyPanther,
I couldn’t agree more. I always wait several months when a new version of anything comes out, let someone else work out the bugs as I don’t need any more headaches.