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As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it. Installin

by moe 15y ago

As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it. Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies. The hard part is installing the exact same Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact same Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them. In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be harmful, just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself. I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that. If you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything. For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...

sanderjd 15y ago
As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here are completely different. Your problem definitely exists, and lots of people are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong. Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.
- moe 15y ago
  and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier Seriously? 1. Install XCode and homebrew 2. sudo brew install {postgresql,rbenv,ruby-build} 3. Close terminal. Open terminal. 4. mkdir proj && cd proj && rbenv install 1.9.2-p290 && rbenv local 1.9.2-p290 5. gem install rails && rbenv rehash 6. rails new foo Honestly, we can argue if this was 5 steps or 8. We can also argue if 'rbenv rehash' should be necessary (I'm not even sure it really is, wrote that down from top of my head). But if someone fails on these instructions that fit on a Post-It™ then they should overthink their ambitions towards a programming career. And if they run into bugs during that procedure then these bugs must be fixed. Because this is (and should be) the canonical way to install a vanilla Rails on OSX.
  - sanderjd 15y ago
    Dude, take a step back and forget that you know this stuff already and do it professionally. That list is not easy and far from obvious, even for real programmers coming from other environments, let alone for actual programming beginners. Your list is far from canonical even at this very moment and hasn't even been common for very long. To figure out your list, I have to: 1) know that homebrew is the "right" way to install software that rails depends on, rather than MacPorts or Fink, or the Mac app store, or download.com, and oh yeah, there is this thing called sudo, and I should install homebrew recipes using it, or should I??, 2) know that rbenv and ruby-build are things that exist and that they are competitors to RVM but are either more or less in vogue depending on who I talk to, 3) understand that rbenv doesn't just work in the current shell without closing and re-opening it, 4) know that the "right" version of ruby to use is 1.9.2-p290 (I have to know the patch-number?!) and that I need to install it and set it as my local version (wait, what does that mean, why do I need a local version?), before I can get around to actually installing rails and using it. Now, I could just blindly follow someone's list from a blog post (randomly chosen presumably, because the theory here is that I don't know enough about these things to make an informed decision). Maybe I would even get lucky and find a list that works properly with the version of rails that the official documentation is talking about, but it would still be a much better experience by far to go to the official rails site and be told: "hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image straight from us!".
specialist 15y ago
> he's tackling a non-issue here IDK. The barriers to entry for RoR on the Mac are pretty high. I was keenly interested in an open source open government project (Sunlight Foundation). I tried to get it running on my Mac, on my personal time. I had direct expert help (friends who dev using Ruby, Rails, etc.). I understand the tool stack was churning, something about mismatched versions, runtimes, whatever. I gave up after three weeks. I don't care care how "awesome" Rails is. If it doesn't work out of the box, like all the LAMPs distros, devs will find something that does. I hate Spring, Maven, ORM and all the other webby enterprisey Java crap with the passion of a billion burning suns. But the RoR nonsense was a whole 'nother level of insanity. I'd rather take a bat to the face, or use PHP, than try RoR again. (I should add that my bad experience was ~1 year ago. Maybe things have improved. Alas, I've moved on to greener pastures.)

by moe 15y ago

sanderjd 15y ago

As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here are completely different. Your problem definitely exists, and lots of people are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong. Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.

moe 15y ago
and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier Seriously? 1. Install XCode and homebrew 2. sudo brew install {postgresql,rbenv,ruby-build} 3. Close terminal. Open terminal. 4. mkdir proj && cd proj && rbenv install 1.9.2-p290 && rbenv local 1.9.2-p290 5. gem install rails && rbenv rehash 6. rails new foo Honestly, we can argue if this was 5 steps or 8. We can also argue if 'rbenv rehash' should be necessary (I'm not even sure it really is, wrote that down from top of my head). But if someone fails on these instructions that fit on a Post-It™ then they should overthink their ambitions towards a programming career. And if they run into bugs during that procedure then these bugs must be fixed. Because this is (and should be) the canonical way to install a vanilla Rails on OSX.
- sanderjd 15y ago
  Dude, take a step back and forget that you know this stuff already and do it professionally. That list is not easy and far from obvious, even for real programmers coming from other environments, let alone for actual programming beginners. Your list is far from canonical even at this very moment and hasn't even been common for very long. To figure out your list, I have to: 1) know that homebrew is the "right" way to install software that rails depends on, rather than MacPorts or Fink, or the Mac app store, or download.com, and oh yeah, there is this thing called sudo, and I should install homebrew recipes using it, or should I??, 2) know that rbenv and ruby-build are things that exist and that they are competitors to RVM but are either more or less in vogue depending on who I talk to, 3) understand that rbenv doesn't just work in the current shell without closing and re-opening it, 4) know that the "right" version of ruby to use is 1.9.2-p290 (I have to know the patch-number?!) and that I need to install it and set it as my local version (wait, what does that mean, why do I need a local version?), before I can get around to actually installing rails and using it. Now, I could just blindly follow someone's list from a blog post (randomly chosen presumably, because the theory here is that I don't know enough about these things to make an informed decision). Maybe I would even get lucky and find a list that works properly with the version of rails that the official documentation is talking about, but it would still be a much better experience by far to go to the official rails site and be told: "hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image straight from us!".

specialist 15y ago

> he's tackling a non-issue here IDK. The barriers to entry for RoR on the Mac are pretty high. I was keenly interested in an open source open government project (Sunlight Foundation). I tried to get it running on my Mac, on my personal time. I had direct expert help (friends who dev using Ruby, Rails, etc.). I understand the tool stack was churning, something about mismatched versions, runtimes, whatever. I gave up after three weeks. I don't care care how "awesome" Rails is. If it doesn't work out of the box, like all the LAMPs distros, devs will find something that does. I hate Spring, Maven, ORM and all the other webby enterprisey Java crap with the passion of a billion burning suns. But the RoR nonsense was a whole 'nother level of insanity. I'd rather take a bat to the face, or use PHP, than try RoR again. (I should add that my bad experience was ~1 year ago. Maybe things have improved. Alas, I've moved on to greener pastures.)