@Jeremy: You’re somewhat twisting my words, I’m not saying software
should never change. Just that this is a purely cosmetic change.
Cosmetic changes are actually largely why I would use Rails in the first place, I think – and why, when I use Sequel::Model instead of ActiveRecord, I still end up using has_many and belongs_to, rather than one_to_many or associate.
Semantics are important. Syntactic sugar (or vinegar) is important.
@David: Lots of plugins mixin to ActiveRecord::Base, or override
methods. Are you going to volunteer to help all those maintainers fix
them? And add nasty checks everywhere to see if Base is defined; else
use the new “better” name?
Those “nasty” checks could be on Rails.version.
And for the third time now, those plugins would continue to work. ActiveRecord::Base would be exactly the same as ActiveRecord, until a major breaking change (Rails 3?).
Now, Xavier mentions an interesting option that may satisfy both
camps. Create an ApplicationModel like ApplicationController.
Yes, that would satisfy me.
Not that I was particularly passionate about this in the first place. I just wanted to demonstrate that this could be a purely cosmetic change, with little or no impact on compatibility.
Since I actually don’t care, I guess I’m just making noise. I’ll stop.