Major update to site backend

Created 1/25/2009, updated 3/5/2024

1 minute read

I've just deployed a rather large update to the Rails app which powers this site. There were lots of changes, so if anything is behaving strangely please get in touch with me by email (example@example.com) or by opening a ticket.

If you look at the number of lines changed since the last deployment it looks quite scary:

1707 files changed, 47088 insertions(+), 90484 deletions(-)

Even scarier if you don't pass in the rename and copy detection switches (-M, -C) to git diff:

2067 files changed, 76581 insertions(+), 119977 deletions(-)

Although almost all of those are updates to stuff that's frozen in vendor, including Rails itself:

   3.0% vendor/rails/activerecord/test/
   3.1% vendor/plugins/rspec-rails/spec/
   3.1% vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/
   3.2% vendor/gems/haml-2.0.3/
   3.2% vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/javascripts/
   3.3% vendor/gems/wikitext-1.2.1/ext/
   3.3% vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/
   3.4% vendor/gems/haml-2.0.6/
   3.9% vendor/rails/
   4.3% vendor/gems/
   4.5% vendor/rails/actionpack/test/
   5.0% vendor/plugins/rspec/
   6.2% vendor/gems/wikitext-1.3.2/ext/
   8.3% vendor/rails/railties/doc/guides/source/images/
   8.9% vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/values/
  10.1% vendor/rails/railties/doc/guides/source/
  19.7% vendor/rails/railties/doc/guides/html/

If we look at the count of changes to actual application code (in app, lib and spec) the numbers are much less frightening:

160 files changed, 662 insertions(+), 1347 deletions(-)

And a lot of those were changes to specs:

   3.3% spec/views/search/
   3.5% spec/views/
   3.6% app/helpers/
   4.0% app/views/issues/
   4.3% lib/
   4.8% spec/
   6.1% app/models/
   7.4% app/controllers/
  12.3% lib/tasks/
  12.8% spec/models/
  13.1% app/views/
  24.1% spec/controllers/

Even so, we're still talking about quite a few big changes, not least of which is the switch over to SSL to provide protection against cookie capture attacks, so I'd appreciate you keeping me informed of any anomalies you might see.