[foodstances]

Boring yet still very volatile.

I wonder if or when Rails will settle down and stop changing everything between major releases causing all documentation to be out of date, gems to break, developer habits to break, etc. Not to mention all of the related tooling like Bundler which seems to spit out new and uninteresting warnings and errors every time I update it.

It would be great to be able to write an application using a framework and not have to constantly change the application just to get long-term updates to the framework like bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with new versions of Ruby, etc.

Basically Rails-LTS but not from a 3rd-party (and embraced by the ecosystem).

[jeffnappi]

We just recently upgraded our large Rails app from Rails 5.0 to Rails 5.1. I wanted to come back to this discussion because I'm actually astonished how easy it was to upgrade. Our project has 1,156 Ruby files consisting of 55,396 lines of actual code (per cloc, rspec and app code). Want to guess how many lines had to be updated to upgrade to Rails 5.1? 24 or 0.04%.

Rails is quite stable.

[jeffnappi]

Volatile in comparison to what exactly?

[gkya]

Django. I'm not doing software these days but still following the news etc., and it seems to me that the general knowledge of the tool is still operable since very early releases. I'm not very familiar with Rails itself but when an environment changes very quickly it's both a big distraction and a great inconvenience. I've last worked with django around January 2014, today when I look at a Django app it's the same beast but a bit better. I was also interested in node in its first days, then about 0.12 I lost my interest. Each time I look at it it's a new thing. If Rails is more like node than Django, that's a problem for a beginner, as they'd rather spend time learning fundamentals of web dev rather than learning a breaking change every month.

[actsasbuffoon]

The upgrades have progressively become much less painful. Rails 1 to 2 was a big deal, as the change introduced the RESTful API. Rails 3 was slightly less violent, but the asset pipeline was still a pretty big deal. Rails 4 had a lot of API cleanup/simplification. A lot of meta programming magic was removed in favor of simpler code, which resulted in some rewriting of existing code.

Rails 5 was the easiest upgrade yet. ActionCable was the big change, but it’s an addition to Rails, not a replacement for some existing tech. As a result, it doesn’t disturb much existing code.

[jeffnappi]

This has been my experience. I've been working on a large Rails project that started on Rails 4 beta in ~2014. Since then it's been incredibly stable and the upgrade paths have been quite simple from 4.0 to 4.1, then 4.2 and now we're on 5.0 with a few minor updates left before moving to 5.1.

Everything would have worked fine if we didn't keep things up to date, but just about everything in the software world needs to be continuously updated due to security updates/patches, etc.

[true_religion]

In comparison to Python, where things just work for years without being touched. Upgrading can get you a better api or performance for a specific workload but rarely will it be necessary.