Re: [PhillyOnRails] couple simple ror questions

[Mat Schaffer <schapht@gmail.com>]

On Aug 13, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Keith Fitzgerald wrote:

> agreed about documentation but i can't help to think about Martin  
> Fowler's paper on continuous integration:
>
> "The basic rule of thumb is that you should be able to walk up to  
> the project with a virgin machine, do a checkout, and be able to  
> fully build the system. Only a minimal amount of things should be  
> on the virgin machine - usually things that are large, complicated  
> to install, and stable. An operating system, Java development  
> environment, or base database system are typical examples."
>
> Although we don't build ror apps, I feel like this is still sound  
> advice. We should be able to deploy onto virgin machines.
>
> As ror continues to grow [and libraries continue to expand], i  
> can't help but think that the documentation solution will become a  
> bit unwieldy.
>
> Plus, as a developer what would you rather: you checkout and *it  
> just works* or you checkout and spend the next 30 minutes or so  
> reading documentation [which very well might not be totally up to  
> date]

Yeah, docs do get unwieldy.  The install to virgin machine thing is  
totally doable via rake, but if you're dealing with someone else's  
app they might not have thought to build in rake tasks to do things  
like look for and install dependencies.  I bet you could even work  
out a method to let gem handle the dependencies directly.  Possible a  
gem spec for your rails app or something.

But how many developers really take the time for that sort of  
infrastructure on a webapp?  Not many in my experience.  I feel  
thankful to get unit tests and decent code coverage.

-Mat
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