Numerous developers developing Rails app on different OSes

Hi all,

I was wondering whether there were any problems, or things to look out for, if you had numerous developers all working on the same application, but they uses different operating systems to do their work? I am looking at some developers doing work on Windows and OS X, working on the one project.

Cheers, Diego

Hello Diego,

I am working on a project with one developer running on Windows XP (eclipse) and another on Fedora Core 6. We have another server hosting our CVS, and yet another running the deployed application (OS? Some sort of *NIX). No problems due to OS specific stuff. Everybody is using eclipse but I don't think that really matters.

Hi mvargo,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. We actually took the leap. So there's one guy (me) on OS X and another on Windows both doing dev on the same app.

Cheers, Diego

I was wondering whether there were any problems, or things to look out for, if you had numerous developers all working on the same application, but they uses different operating systems to do their work? I am looking at some developers doing work on Windows and OS X, working on the one project.

One thing to look out for is spacing. You will want to make very sure you don't use tab characters anywhere in your application, instead opting for spaces. Otherwise, otherwise identical application checkouts may work perfectly on non-Windows platforms while Ruby on Windows may randomly throw the weirdest parsing errors at you.

Roderick

Hi,

We are developing with windows, ubuntu, FreeBSD and OS X with out any problems. One thing to look out for would be different DB.

Rasmus

Use svn’s ignore ability to handle the database.yml configurations if necessary.

As long as all developers on your team use a quality text editor that does Unix line breaks and uses spaces instead of tabs, you should have no problems at all.