Re:Burning out on Capistrano (Jamis Buck)
by mattmcknight on Sunday December 07, 2008 @11:31PM
(#389487)
I think the reason it's a Ruby problem is the c - extensions to Ruby are hard to cross compile across platforms. Windows is a particular problem because the c compiler situation is not consistent. There are still a lot of people using Visual Studio 6 to compile this stuff....
As far as deployment goes, when you can run Windows services for the mongrels, do you even need capistrano? I've been doing Rails for years without it and don't feel like I need help deploying....
Isn't the C extension issue the same for other languages, eg Python or PHP? (I really don't know, I'm not that familiar with Ruby internals)
I think this issue, like Capistrano's, would benefit from having more Ruby coders, which in itself might require a more newbie-friendly approach from the community.
(BTW I hope it doesn't seem like I'm criticizing Jamis' choice - actually I think he's doing the right thing in the current situation, just that if there were more Ruby coders around he might not be forced into choosing this path)
As for newbie devs, I'm not sure I agree... as a non-newbie, I still like to get a solution that works. I might be able to dive into the code and fix it, but I don't want to do this - I prefer to focus on my app rather than figure out why certain libraries don't work.
(For some reason this view seems to be common in Ruby. A prominent example was the web server - until Passenger came along (surprising everyone) you were supposed to figure out how to deploy with lighttpd, then mongrel - instead of simply working with Apache which most of the world already knew how to install, scale and tune.)