Rails update headaches

Created 2/15/2009, updated 3/12/2020

3 minute read

In my rant from the other day I was complaining about how trying to build an application on top of Rails and friends is like building on quicksand.

Let me provide a little bit of illustration from my current battle in moving from 2.2.2 to 2.3.0 RC1.

I don't have the time or the patience to go back and data-mine my development history charting the pain and suffering that each Rails update brings with it, but here is just a quick sampling obtained with git oneline --grep='[Rr]ails' (oneline is an alias for log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit).

Unfortunately these one-line commit subjects can't really hope to communicate the misspent time, frustration, and annoyance at doing mindless "busy work" rather than working on useful features and application (not framework) bug fixes.

Rails 2.3.0 RC1:

ee7f441... Rails 2.3.0: work around Sweeper autoloading bug
51c949f... Rails 2.3.0: silence deprecation warnings
f183ca8... Update to Rails 2.3.0 RC1

Rails 2.2.2:

1b8ca39... Rails 2.2 fix: repair Haml "ugly" mode breakage
c032fb1... Fix recent Rails breakage of template engines
3f8ad3f... Better fix for Rails 2.2.0 model preloading breakage
6985cb3... Update to Rails 2.2.2 (final release)

Rails 2.2.1:

316221e... Update to Rails 2.2.1

Rails 2.2.0:

35ded72... Fix Rails 2.2.0 breakage: route generation behaviour changed
5ab0c87... Rails 2.2.0: remove now-redundant body_html method from Articles helper
c992cda... Fix Rails 2.2.0 breakage: newly created Articles no longer have nil bodies
c3d4a47... Rails 2.2.0: silence deprecation warnings for "default_error_messages"
5191b28... Rails 2.2.0: silence deprecation warnings for "truncate"
8a5a83c... Fix Rails 2.2.0 breakage (cache_template_loading has been removed)
a5d0bdc... Kludge fix for Rails 2.2.0 breakage (broken extensions to ActiveRecord::Base)
d93062f... Fix Rails 2.2.0 breakage (ActionView::TemplateHandler)
12a6788... Fix Rails 2.2.0 breakage (cache_template_extensions removal)
bfd9b00... Update to Rails 2.2.0 (first release candidate, broken)

Rails 2.1.2:

4d49bca... Another fix for Rails bug #324
bfa1d20... Re-apply private fix for Rails bug #324
627d796... Update to Rails 2.1.2 (broken)

Rails 2.1.1:

ca7578e... Fix Rails 2.1 breakage of wikitext templates
3f793f2... Private fix for Rails bug #324
c2509ed... Fix for Rails bug #1003 (rake gems:unpack breakage)
77c346f... Update comments about Rails ticket #324
a8a04e3... Update to Rails 2.1.1

Rails 2.1:

d51249c... Back out the REXML vulnerability fix
f6d7779... Silence deprecation warning triggered by RSpec 1.1.4
3808f57... Update to Haml 2.0.2
889fc07... Remove workaround or Rails ticket #275
ae79cd6... Update to Rails 2.1

Rails 2.1.0 RC1:

49e4217... Update application controller specs for Rails 2.1
c2ac696... Fix Rails load ordering of frozen gems
e1fe380... Fixes for Rails gems dependencies
a73e850... Update to Rails 2.1.0_RC1

I was quite surprised when updating to 2.3.0 RC1 that all the specs continued to pass. One should never count one's chickens before they've hatched, however, as I have run into a couple of issues despite the fact that the spec suite passed. I do have a lot of specs ("1019 examples, 0 failures, 23 pending"), but evidently you can never have enough...

The three unresolved issues that are currently robbing me of time that I would rather be spending on something else are:

My cache sweepers stopped getting auto-loaded in 2.3.0: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/323ff7ec2d95ee32/ab33ad8c16b300e5
Haml started complaining (not sure whether this is a bug in Haml, or provoked by a change in Rails): http://groups.google.com/group/haml/browse_thread/thread/d4902a4d4d5de5aa
Atom feeds rendered using Builder templates are busted (they're being rendered inside the application HTML template): http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/d2d150c8219e5814

Now, none of these issues are show-stoppers. They're either harmless or have known workarounds. But that doesn't make them any less annoying. They're time wasters. And every kludgey little fix that you use to wallpaper over the cracks is another layer of crud that accumulates in your app. Another blemish in the code base, brittle and fragile, waiting to be re-broken in a future update.