One’s DoS fix is one’s test breach (A Ruby Rant)

What do you know, it did indeed become a series!

Even though I’m leaving for Los Angeles again on Monday, March 5th, I’m still trying to package up the few dependencies that I’m missing to be able to get Radiant 1.0 in tree. This became more important to me now that Radiant 1.0.0 has finally been released, even though it might become easier for me to just target 1.1.0 at some later point, given that it would then use Rails 3. Together with that I’m trying to find what I need to get Typo 6 running to update this blog’s engine under the hood.

Anyway one of the dependencies I needed to package for Radiant 1.0. was delocalize which is an interesting library that allows dealing with localise date and time formats (which is something I had to hack together for a project myself, so I’m quite interested in it). Unfortunately, the version I committed to the tree is not the right one I should have packaged, which would have been 0.2.6 or so — since Radiant 1.0 is still on Rails 2.3. Unfortunately there is not a git tag for 0.2.6 so I haven’t packaged that one yet (and the .gem file only has some of the needed test files, not all of them — it’s the usual issue: why do you package the test files in the .gem file if you do not package the test data?), but I’m also trying to find why the code is failing on Ruby 1.9.

Upstream is collaborative and responsive, but as many others is now more focused on Ruby 1.9, rather than 1.8. What does this mean? Well, one of the recent changes to most of the programming languages out there involves changing the way keys are mangled in hash-based storage objects (such as Ruby’s Hash); this has changed the way Ruby 1.8 reported the content of those objects (Ruby 1.9 has ordered hashes which means that they don’t appear to have changed), which caused headaches for both me and Hans for quite a while.

This shows just one of the many reasons why we might have to step in on the throttle and try to get Ruby 1.9 stable and usable soon, possibly even before Ruby 1.8 falls out of security updates, which is scheduled for June — which was what I promised in the FOSDEM talk and I’m striving to make sure we deliver.