Open Sourcery

I spent some time getting PowerDNS on Rails to run on Ruby 1.9.1, which ended up being very easy due to the small amount of plugins & gems used by the project. The only change I had to make myself was to the acts_as_audited plugin, where the one-line fix got merged upstream.

The worst part of the process was getting the specs to run with rake spec. Using ./script/spec it worked on individual specs and on all the specs worked as advertised, but rake spec didn’t do anything.

After a lot of time spent in the debugger I wasn’t any wiser. The only difference was that in Ruby 1.8 the example groups were fully loaded, and in Ruby 1.9 they were empty. I gave up and started searching relentlessly for some information on the issue. I couldn’t find anything, until I found an indirect solution on the rspec wiki. It seems that if you have any versions of the test-unit gem after the 1.2.3 release installed, your Rails specs will simply not run. For me, removing test-unit 2.0.3 made the difference and the specs ran properly. PowerDNS on Rails has now joined the ranks of my Ruby 1.9 compatible projects.

After I read this post on Labnotes I decided to “take the plunge” into the world of Ruby 1.9 properly. I mean, I was at RubyKaigi where the biggest lesson of all was “Change!” (and changing to 1.9). Ruby 1.9.1 has been stable for quite some time now, and 1.9.2 is due out on Christmas. And we’re still stuck on 1.8.6 ? WTF

Getting started with Ruby 1.9 is easy (only time will tell how much pain is caused). I have to admit I’m not as brave to wipe my rubygems installation, I might still need 1.8.6 (and I seriously hope I don’t).

So Relevance made this awesome bash script called ruby_switcher.sh that you absolutely have to try. Once you have it installed and working as per their instructions you need to make one small change to the very last line of ruby_switcher.sh. That change looks like this:

#use_leopard_ruby
use_ruby_191

Simple and I can easily toggle 1.8.6 mode if needed.

Yes, I did.

So over the coming days I’ll be working through all 28 of my github repos and making sure they run on 1.9. This is no small task, but I’m looking forward to getting my “house” in order.

At this stage I know acts_as_audited is 1.9 compatible, I fixed it earlier the week while testing ruby_switcher. I had a look at ActiveRecord::Tableless and decided to pull the plug on the project completely (see here).

I’m really looking forward to this adventure and sharing the ups and downs of the road with everyone. Ultimately I would love it if we can get the South Africa Ruby ecosystem on 1.9.X ASAP.

Follow my project updates over on my Ruby 1.9 Progress Report