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by bdcravens 252 days ago
It's useful, but not necessary. Plenty of 10+ year old Rails apps in the wild. Github was running Rails 2.3 until 2018 while the entire software world that depended on it didn't fall apart. Even if you follow best advice and update your dependencies for security sake, you can effectively run the same code using the old "trends" (aside from things like safe parameters, etc).
2 comments
holman 252 days ago
(fwiw, GitHub switched to Rails 3 sometime around 2011-2012 or so).
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mvdtnz 252 days ago
Large rails apps tend to be on older versions not because they're so very stable but because Rails upgrades are a nightmare at scale. Even point versions have lots of undocumented breaking changes. There was a lot I didn't like during my 4 years as a rails developer but upgrades were the very worst of it.
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Lukas_Skywalker 252 days ago
Github is now running on the main branch:

> Every Monday a scheduled GitHub Action workflow triggers an automated pull request, which bumps our Rails version to the latest commit on the Rails main branch for that day.

https://github.blog/engineering/building-github-with-ruby-an...

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cullenking 252 days ago
it all depends on your philosophy on dependencies. if you maintain a small set of core dependencies that are there for good reasons and are actively maintained, then rails upgrades are pretty easy. if you have a Gemfile that has a bunch of third party gems that you bring in for small problems here and there, you have to occasionally pay down that debt on version upgrades. we have an 18 year old rails codebase currently on 7.1 that hasn't proven to be a big pain for upgrades. the hardest upgrade we did was because of a core dependency that had been dead for 5 years broke with a new version of rails. but that was a story of letting technical debt ride for too long and having to pay it back.

this is a common problem in any complex codebase that has a culture of using third party dependencies to solve small problems. you see this conversation all the time with modern frontend development and the resulting dependency tree you get with npm etc....

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