It could have been a typo and she or he meant a "temporary" fix (a fix intended to last only a short time), or the original coder could have meant it was a fix to address an issue related to time, as "temporal" is an adjective meaning "related to time."
Generally if I saw that and I knew the coder had a sophisticated grasp of the English language, I'd assume the latter. If I thought the (obscure) word "temporal" was out of the coder's vocabulary, I'd assume it was a typo and he had meant "temporary." But clearly Colin Law has the best interpretation — there was a rift in the spacetime continuum that needed a line of Ruby code to patch it. -Jason > On Oct 13, 2017, at 11:49 AM, Colin Hart <epicur...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Gotcha, makes sense. Thanks for the detailed response! > > > On Friday, October 13, 2017 at 11:37:48 AM UTC-4, Xavier Noria wrote: > On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 5:25 PM, Colin Hart <epic...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > What exactly is a temporal fix? > > I was joking. > > Sometimes you fix something, but the fix is temporary, which means it is > expected to be eventually gone, should be gone better sooner than later. > > This may happen in many scenarios, but to put an example: a gem you depend on > has a bug, you monkey patch it instead of forking because the fix is trivial. > That should be undone when the bug is fixed in the gem and you upgrade. It is > a temporary hack. > > I said "typical" because it is not unsual that people forget they did > something "temporary" and that stays in the code base for a long time. Maybe > even they are gone and maintainers do not know under which circumstances the > temporary fix can be deleted, etc. > > In practice that needs some kind of discipline. For example, in the use case > above I wrap the fix in a version check that raises if the version is not the > expected one (that is, the application cannot even boot if you upgrade the > gem). And that forces you to revisit that spot instead of relying on memory. > A code comment for maintainers does wonders too. > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com > <mailto:rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core > <https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. ---- Jason Fleetwood-Boldt t...@datatravels.com http://www.jasonfleetwoodboldt.com/writing If you'd like to reply by encrypted email you can find my public key on jasonfleetwoodboldt.com <http://jasonfleetwoodboldt.com/> (more about setting GPG: https://gpgtools.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
