Garbage Burrito

I’ve been putting it off for a while, but I finally got around to upgrading Doodlekit to Rails 1.2.3.  I planned on documenting the upgrade, so that I could post it here and possibly help some people out.  However, it turned into such a shitstorm, I had to just go monk and get it done.

Here are some highlights.

1.  My main problem was with engines.  Doodlekit has become so huge that I implement the Addons as engines to help keep things manageable.  I had a lot of weird errors at the beginning, and I finally figured out it was because of the changes in the way engines work.  Apparently a lot of the engine code has been sucked up into rails core, and the actual engines implementation is pretty light.  

At first I upgraded the engines plugin using script/plugin, but after getting more errors I finally just deleted the engines dir, and installed it fresh.  That cleared up most of my problems.  

2.  There were a lot of places where I was auto-loading classes that I need to manually require.  In this case it was just a matter of running the tests and finding each one.  Not too bad.

3.  Form tags.  Friggin frackin form tags! When I finally got my tests to actually run, all I could see were deprecation warnings.  Most of them were pretty easy fixes, however I wish I would have counted how many form tags I had to fix.  I couldn’t stand all the warnings, so I buckled down and replaced all the start and end_form_tag’s with the new sexier block method.  This did give me a chance to clean up some other things that were bothering me.  I mean as long as I was touching every view in my codebase.

4.  I finally got all my tests running cleanly, and did a manual walk through.  Not so fast Billy Ray.  My routing wasn’t working at all.  See in order to support the multi-site environment locally, I use a subdirectory context, like http://localhost:3000/default/blog, http://localhost:3000/garbageburrito/blog.  I have a special routing for development mode that pulls that directory name out.  However Rails new routing system didn’t seem to like that at all.   

I figured it would be a lot of trouble to get that all running properly, so I just scrapped it.  Now I can test a single site without any special setup, and I can test multi-site by adding sub-domains to my hosts file.  I might try something slicker down the road, but I’m tired now.

5.  I did the walkthrough, found a few bugs here and there, and was ready for deployment.  At first I just did a normal rails upgrade through gem, and cap’d it.  Mongrel wouldn’t start cause it couldn’t find ‘gem’.  So after some frustration I figured out I needed to upgrade rubygems from 0.8.11 to 0.9.2.  I tried ‘gem install rubygems-update’ first, but ‘gem –v’ still came up with the old version.  After some digging I found out I needed ‘gem update –system’, which did the trick.  

However it still gave me the require_gem deprecation warning.  I figured this was cause I still had ruby 1.8.4.  For some reason yum couldn’t find the latest version of ruby, so I compiled it from source, removed it from yum, and re-installed all the gems.

Running swimmingly now.

Like I said, I hoped that would have been more instructional than narrative, but it just wasn’t that clean.  Please oh please don’t make me go through this for 2.0.