The thing about gem churn is somewhat true, BUT that is a problem in any open source eco-system that I've seen so far. And in fact I think Rails fares much better in this area than most others. There are a lot of very high quality gems out there that are actively maintained and play well together. Contrast that to the cesspool that is Wordpress plugins.
Re:The Rails Doctrine
by vinceguidry on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @02:40PM
(#10933350)
My solution for this is to never specify gem versions in my Gemfile and once a month or so do bundle update. Much easier to fix one gem update problem at a time than to try to fix 6 all at once.
The problem is when you won't notice something went wrong with the update.
You will if you use proper TDD.
What's true of all bugs? It passed all the tests
I don't here about people being bug free with TDD ( though significantly less bugful)
Obviously all about tradeoffs, but my impression is that if a third party lib needs a major version update, the time changing the version in your requirements is dwarfed by the time needed to investigate generally
You're going to love http://deppbot.com.
(Disclaimer, some friends of mine made it)
Re:The Rails Doctrine
by lucaspiller on Thursday January 21, 2016 @04:07AM
(#10944139)
Yes my experience has been the same. It's definitely better now (i.e. maintainers seem to be caring about backwards and forward compatibility), but even 5 years ago there were a lot of popular gems that have now been abandoned.
It's still better than JavaScript, where whatever popular build tool you use today will be replaced in 6 months :D
But the churn on gems is very painful. To be successful with Rails long term, you must make time to constantly upgrade your framework, for for too often a gem maintainer will just stop supporting older versions of the framework.
And all of a sudden the version you need won't build, or isn't compatible with something else, etc.
So Rails is great. It saves you tons of time and gives you rock solid web apps that talk to databases. As long as you don't fall behind in your gem versions. :)
That's me speaking after maintaining several apps from Rails 1 all the way to 4.2. And probably 5.