Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Two critical patches for Rails 1.2.2

Posted 12 March 2007 @ 5pm | Tagged thoughts

Submit to HN

There are two main problems I ran into in Rails 1.2 that required a lot of investigation. The first is a problem with has_many :through. Simply, it is broken. You cannot add or delete to through associations that use anything but the basics (so modeling friends/friendships with double references to the same table gets you in trouble). To fix this use the Ticket 6466 patch. The second problem is a really nasty breakage in routing, and it baffles me that this did not make it into the 1.2.2 release or was not immediately released as Rails 1.2.3. What happens is if you have a parameter in your route and you use the same parameter in generating a url on the page, it will simply not be included in the url. This caused me many hours of grief migrating to Rails 1.2 and trying to figure out why most of my urls seemed to be inexplicably broken, until I tracked down the problem to this Ticket 6752 where they have a patch available to fix the issue. Rails guys need to do a better job at assessing impact of these tickets. Especially this last patch that clearly affects a lot of routing, should have been released….

The first patch was applied about a week ago, and the routing patch was applied 3 months ago. Looks like the routing patch didn’t make it into the stable branch for whatever reason. You can always elevate these issues on the rails-core list.

I guess what was not clear to me is that I should be running 1-2-stable? My understanding is that if I wanted the latest rails I should be freezing TAG 1-2-2 because that was the last official announced release. I also assumed any critical errors such as the routing should be backpatched into that TAG?

First patch is no good in 1-2-stable. You guys applied a different patch which fixed the has_many through push but did not fix the delete. You should probably apply the patch that was actually attached to ticket 6466…