Backwards Compatibility FTW
Posted: Sun, 12 July 2009 | permalink | No comments
Over the weekend I updated a small app I wrote for my local bushfire brigade from Rails 1.2 to Rails 2.3. Given it's small size, all-encompassing test suite, and general lack of mission criticality, I decided to bite the bullet and just kick up straight to Rails 2.3.2, and fix whatever broke. I was expecting quite a bit of fun and games.
Well, there was fun, and there were games, but it was all relatively painless. I had to run rake rails:unpdate, add a couple of session config lines to my environment.rb, and get rid of a bunch of testing plugins that had been superceded by functionality in core (which involved me rewriting an awful lot of XPath into CSS selectors -- a massive net win, I have to say), but the core code of the application was completely unchanged (not a single line changed in the app directory).
Given the number of major releases I leapt, and the fairly haphazard way in which I did it, I am quite pleasantly surprised at the outcome. Kudos to all the Rails hackers who made it possible.
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