AssetNotPrecompiledError for missing assets - really?

I migrated one of my projects to from Rails 3.0 to 3.2.1 which means I'm using the asset pipeline for the first time. As much as I like the ease of compressing and minifying my assets the more I'm annoyed about its behavior to raise an AssetNotPrecompiledError as soon as, well, there's an asset that's not precompiled.

Can somebody explain me the reason why this is considered to be a good idea? For something as trivial as a missing image file the app fails completely instead of just falling back to "old style" image_tag behavior (images/foo.png vs assets/foo.png) and maybe produce an error log line. Even a missing js or css file isn't necessarily a showstopper. At least the app would still be usable for a user until the "problem" gets fixed.

I just cant see the benefit of this new behavior.

What am I missing out here?

cheers

Maybe this option can help you:

Don’t fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed

config.assets.compile = false

from http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html .

It’s off (false) by default, but if you wanted you could turn it on.

In that case, you probably need to make this group

in your Gemfile

Gems used only for assets and not required

in production environments by default.

group :assets do

gem ‘sass-rails’

gem ‘coffee-rails’

gem ‘uglifier’

gem ‘bootstrap-sass’

end

also available in production (which would mean to put it

outside of the :assets group).

HTH,

Peter