moving to Rails 2.x

Finally about to make the move from 1.2.6 to 2.? and am curious about strategy...

I've looked at a bunch of postings across the web about upgrading, but many of them seem to be written back when 2.0 was only a RC and it seems like this has been a changing picture throughout the year (one of the reasons I've waited).

Many of the postings in this group from earlier in the year seem to point to lots of problems in making the move as well and, so, I ask some questions:

1) which version rails is the one to move to (most stable and ready)?

2) when I update does the process leave old gems in place so that if I need to move back, it's "easy"?

3) if I want to try starting a new small app to learn the ropes vs. updating my big app, can I leave all the rails 1.2.6-oriented pieces in place and just set RAILS_GEM_VERSION to the 2.x version I'll be using? or is it messier in some way?

I'm sure there's more I could be asking here and I'd be glad for this to start a thread discussing/revealing any issues and gotchas to watch out for. As you can see from my questions, I'm mostly trying to avoid really messing things up before I start.

Finally about to make the move from 1.2.6 to 2.? and am curious about strategy...

I've looked at a bunch of postings across the web about upgrading, but many of them seem to be written back when 2.0 was only a RC and it seems like this has been a changing picture throughout the year (one of the reasons I've waited).

Many of the postings in this group from earlier in the year seem to point to lots of problems in making the move as well and, so, I ask some questions:

1) which version rails is the one to move to (most stable and ready)?

I would go straight to the latest stable (ie 2.1.1). The one caveat to that is that it could be the case that some things were marked as deprecated in 2.0 and then removed in 2.1. If you moved to 2.0 first then you get the deprecation warnings rather than have stuff just disappear. I doubt much stuff like that is out there though.

2) when I update does the process leave old gems in place so that if I need to move back, it's "easy"?

Yes

3) if I want to try starting a new small app to learn the ropes vs. updating my big app, can I leave all the rails 1.2.6-oriented pieces in place and just set RAILS_GEM_VERSION to the 2.x version I'll be using? or is it messier in some way?

Yes, you can quite easily have some 1.2.x apps and some 2.x apps

Fred

thanks, guys... very helpful... into the breach!