On 22-sep-2007, at 21:56, Michael Koziarski wrote:
> If there's something in this list you're interested in maintaining,
> please feel free to volunteer.

Sorry for being harsh, but I'lll try to explain what I meant. I tried  
to keep my head down but it just has to be said.
Callbacks should stay if you ask me. It's also not something I  
consider easily pluginizable (this is deep, nasty backend stuff).

Granted, nobody uses components (and they were sort of deadborn  
anyway), so no problem here. Granted, special DB adapters are a spicy  
specialty that only their respective
maintainers should touch. But I got the problem with the big picture.  
It just upsets me that more and more totally vital things get  
extracted without anybody being asked if it's a good cource of action  
or not.
It's just presented as a faite accompli in a changeset. I know the "I  
don't owe you shit" argument, thanks.

So I could take it for pagination (I had no app of all the ones I  
have built that didn't make use of it to date). Why did you kill the  
poor fella? "Did not like the style".
I took it for acts_as_list (none of the apps I've made could do  
without it either). Why did you kill the poor fella? "Did not like  
the style".
I took it for acts_as_nested_set (the half of what I've built got  
that in heavy rotation too).  Why did you kill the poor fella? "Did  
not like the style".

I am all for "less software" and such, but it's kind of unpleasant to  
see the very features which warrant my Rails use
evaporate. With a poof.  And I never, _never_ as of yet made anything  
using the restful paradigm, neither did I have any need to do so.

Did these components have failing tests before extraction? No they  
didn't (most). Did they brake all the time? No. Is someone going to  
do CI with them now that they are gone? _Nobody_.

There are tickets on the trac for nested set and acts as list, and  
everybody knows what happened to them. There are people that wrote  
better_nested_set and friends - this has never become trunk, for one  
reason or another (most of the reasons being political so it seems).

What I ultimately fear (and I consider the fear justified) is that  
there will be a case of component rot (look at what happens to the  
plugins which are already extracted,for instance. "This plugin only  
works with Edge Rails revision 76743"). At the same time nothing is  
being done to actually loose-couple the components (and make their  
partial use possible) - you can't run a plugin test on a controller  
withour running routes. Can you do a template lookup without engaging  
the whole view subsystem and doing major monkeypatching? No you can't  
(yes I did file a ticket on that).

I can imagine that the extractions taking place are targeted at  
simplifying support of Rails as a coherent piece of software. I know  
that extractions do not bring (or bring only minimal) speed benefits  
(it's not that big
of a deal on the performance front to "extract everything").

And yes, I do use habtm callbacks (seldom) and I do use  
spacer_templates (often), even if they might be not en-vogue and rest- 
du-jour. Am I the only one on this list who uses that stuff, I wonder.

The only course of action that I can justify in this case is "extract  
but keep" - that is, the extracted pieces should be integrated into  
the testing/CI lifecycle. At least so that you know when they cease  
to function
between rev. 18212121 and 18212122, while many many innocent folks  
depend on them. So that Rails indeed works like a "composable set of  
plugins" but stays testable and runnable as a whole (with or without
the bells and whistles). As the current course of action goes, it's  
"get rid of" instead of "pluginize". That's the approach that is  
worrying.

Hope I did not offend anyone. If I'm alone in these thoughts I will  
rest my case (I'm not core and I did not win any hackfests, and do  
not do kung-fu, so my opinion weights in at around 2 grams metric).

-- 
Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl



--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby 
on Rails: Core" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to