My app is still in development... should I upgrade it to 2.1?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Well, this is probably a pretty straightforward question. I started developing an app a few weeks ago with Rails 2.0.2, since 2.1 was still in RC status. The app is still in development, and probably about a quarter of the way done (mostly just basic CRUD stuff, nothing major). Since Rails 2.1 has been "officially" released, I'm wondering if I should upgrade the app to use it now so I can take advantage of a lot of the things which 2.1 added.

I know that it's usually a bad idea to upgrade blindly to the new version on a working app, but what about one that you're still in the development stages of? A few of the Rails 2.1 features I think could really help some parts of the app, and worse comes to worse if it did break anything, there isn't anything major going on with it at the moment.

Thoughts?

2

I was in the identical position. The files that 2.0.2 and 2.1 generate are not very different I generated a blank 2.1 project and used the MELD program, available in Ubuntu, to diff and merge. It only took 15 minutes to morph my project to 2.1 I don't think there are many new items that will break much of anything, mine ran fine.

As always, backup you app before your try this, but it worked great for me

Good luck

3

I keep waiting to see a post of anyone upgrading their Windows XP machine from 2.0.2 to 2.1 ? Does anyone know an easy way to do this? I've read 'scare stories' of the new GEMS loading in weird ways. Kathleen

4

When I've had weirdness, it was caused by having gems.rubyonrails.org in my sources list. That source includes beta gems.

Use 'gem environment' to check.

5

Thoughts?

Probably less of an issue with "vanilla" Rails as opposed to compatibility with any gems that you use...

6

Quoting Wayne M <wayne.molina@gmail.com>:

Well, this is probably a pretty straightforward question. I started developing an app a few weeks ago with Rails 2.0.2, since 2.1 was still in RC status. The app is still in development, and probably about a quarter of the way done (mostly just basic CRUD stuff, nothing major). Since Rails 2.1 has been "officially" released, I'm wondering if I should upgrade the app to use it now so I can take advantage of a lot of the things which 2.1 added.

I'd say yes. BUT, make sure that all the plugins you use are available for Rails 2.1. In my case, there are development versions of will_paginate available for 2.1, but not released versions. So I uninstalled 2.1, though I could have forced my app to use 2.0. I will be going to 2.1 eventually, but not today.

Jeffrey