> you
> absolutely need to be able to pass in DEFAULT at minimum - which
> requires non-quoting and non-typecasting of the value.

How about not putting that column (and the meaningless NULL value)
into the INSERT statement if it is a new record on a column with a
default value function (as opposed to a default value constant, which
is the norm)?  Would that work?

If I understand what you're aiming for correctly, I think you may meet
resistance to getting ar-defaults into Rails core, because
non-constant default values is a thing that not many people use with
an ORM layer, and does not fit well into the ORM lifecycle; for
example, it is expected that when you initialize a new record, the
attributes on that record should all be fit to display.  If the
attribute value isn't determined until the record gets inserted into
the database, that's a no-go.  (Similarly you'd need to reload the
attributes after insert to find their values after save.)  As a
general rule, I think "we" like doing our model work in our app,
rather than the DB - it's more of a choice we've made than a "this is
the only right way to do it in the world" kind of statement, there's
plenty of room to do it other ways.

IMHO, there'll always be people who need to step outside the box
sometimes, but unfortunately core Rails libraries can't necessarily
cater to all of them - we'd end up like Microsoft Word where everyone
only uses 10%... but a different 10% each :).

But if there's something simple that we can do to make life easier for
them, maybe that's a better bet, whether it's cleaning up internals
slightly to make it easier to hook in plugins, or maybe if it's a
small patch making changes like detecting "special" columns and
leaving them out of inserts (if that works, as above).

Personally, I think the
http://drawohara.com/post/78208216/rails-activerecord-defaults-for-rails-2-2-2
you posted looks pretty clean already, so I think that should just get
released as a plugin.  We've all got our own list of "10% of Microsoft
Word" features we need from our own plugins, me included :).

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