What has happened to Arel

@inopinatus actually said it best. The issues with the Rails Core team saying “It’s a private API” have actually straight up turned me off from wanting to help.

@rafaelfranca I’m not going to lie, my frustration here has primarily been with you. I am sorry to grind my axe here publicly, but I feel like your responses have been a consistent source of frustration when it comes to Arel in particular. I know we have spoken on several Rails issues. The Arel.sql one comes to mind. I think how that whole thing was handled was not good. But I can move past it if we can work together on it.

I use Arel directly in my applications all the time. Arel provides composable queries without me having to use strings. I am a vocal advocate of its power, and I would love to help others use it too. I can provide plenty of real world examples where we use Arel in situations where ActiveRecord’s query methods simply do not work. Maybe we can just extend ActiveRecord so that it has a more powerful interface and Arel doesn’t need to be public. But either way, there is a need for better SQL writing inside Rails.

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