Now that I have been using rails for several years, (It is June, 2008 as I write this) it occurs to me to ask, "What version of rails am I running". I installed rails using the rubygem system back in 2006 or so (and it seems that I am running version 1.2.3, which in 2008 is a bit "crusty" at best). It also occured to me to ask if rails has in some way crept into the yum/rpm world. I boldly did the following, as soon as I discovered that a drastically newer version of rails was available via yum. Next step will be to sort out what conflict and chaos there may be between the gem stuff and this.
[root@cholla log]# yum list | grep rails rubygem-rails.noarch 2.0.2-2.fc8 updates [root@cholla log]# yum install rubygem-rails Loading "downloadonly" plugin Excluding Packages in global exclude list Finished Setting up Install Process Parsing package install arguments Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package rubygem-rails.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 set to be updated --> Processing Dependency: rubygem(activeresource) = 2.0.2 for package: rubygem-rails --> Processing Dependency: rubygem(activerecord) = 2.0.2 for package: rubygem-rails --> Processing Dependency: rubygem(actionpack) = 2.0.2 for package: rubygem-rails --> Processing Dependency: rubygem(activesupport) = 2.0.2 for package: rubygem-rails --> Processing Dependency: rubygem(rake) >= 0.7.2 for package: rubygem-rails --> Processing Dependency: rubygem(actionmailer) = 2.0.2 for package: rubygem-rails --> Running transaction check ---> Package rubygem-actionpack.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 set to be updated ---> Package rubygem-actionmailer.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 set to be updated ---> Package rubygem-activeresource.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 set to be updated ---> Package rubygem-activesupport.noarch 0:2.0.2-1.fc8 set to be updated ---> Package rubygem-rake.noarch 0:0.8.1-2.fc8 set to be updated ---> Package rubygem-activerecord.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 set to be updated --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ============================================================================= Package Arch Version Repository Size ============================================================================= Installing: rubygem-rails noarch 2.0.2-2.fc8 updates 382 k Installing for dependencies: rubygem-actionmailer noarch 2.0.2-2.fc8 updates 507 k rubygem-actionpack noarch 2.0.2-2.fc8 updates 2.0 M rubygem-activerecord noarch 2.0.2-2.fc8 updates 1.3 M rubygem-activeresource noarch 2.0.2-2.fc8 updates 148 k rubygem-activesupport noarch 2.0.2-1.fc8 updates 790 k rubygem-rake noarch 0.8.1-2.fc8 updates-released 336 k Transaction Summary ============================================================================= Install 7 Package(s) Update 0 Package(s) Remove 0 Package(s) Total download size: 5.4 M Is this ok [y/N]: y Downloading Packages: (1/7): rubygem-activereco 100% |=========================| 1.3 MB 00:00 (2/7): rubygem-rake-0.8.1 100% |=========================| 336 kB 00:00 (3/7): rubygem-activesupp 100% |=========================| 790 kB 00:00 (4/7): rubygem-activereso 100% |=========================| 148 kB 00:00 (5/7): rubygem-actionmail 100% |=========================| 507 kB 00:00 (6/7): rubygem-actionpack 100% |=========================| 2.0 MB 00:00 (7/7): rubygem-rails-2.0. 100% |=========================| 382 kB 00:00 Running rpm_check_debug Running Transaction Test Finished Transaction Test Transaction Test Succeeded Running Transaction Installing: rubygem-activesupport ######################### [1/7] Installing: rubygem-actionpack ######################### [2/7] Installing: rubygem-actionmailer ######################### [3/7] Installing: rubygem-activeresource ######################### [4/7] Installing: rubygem-activerecord ######################### [5/7] Installing: rubygem-rake ######################### [6/7] Installing: rubygem-rails ######################### [7/7] Installed: rubygem-rails.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 Dependency Installed: rubygem-actionmailer.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 rubygem-actionpack.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 rubygem-activerecord.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 rubygem-activeresource.noarch 0:2.0.2-2.fc8 rubygem-activesupport.noarch 0:2.0.2-1.fc8 rubygem-rake.noarch 0:0.8.1-2.fc8 Complete!Now I may have made quite a mess, we shall see, but ultimately this will be a good thing, since yum will keep my rails system up to date (for better or worse, I expect better).
All this gems stuff (whether from yum or whatever) goes into cd /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems, and I see all 4 versions of rails that I have ever used side by side (along with all the supporting versions of activerecord and so forth):
cd /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems ls -ld rails* drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Jul 20 2006 rails-1.1.4 drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Nov 16 2006 rails-1.1.6 drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Aug 16 2007 rails-1.2.3 drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Jun 11 11:33 rails-2.0.2Something new has popped up too: activeresource-2.0.2. A quick look into this seems to indicate that this is a web services and distributed computing kind of thing. The buzzwords for this are: "Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems", which certainly sounds impressive, whatever it all means.
Just to see what dependencies there may be on the old stuff, I create a directory OLD and move all the old versions into there, then try my rails applications -- and they all still work, so far so good.
I type rails -v and get 2.0.2, which is reassuring. I am concerned that my existing rails projects are based on the older version of rails, and I hear about some variable RAILS_GEM_VERSION that either needs to be fiddled by hand, or eliminated to always use the latest version. This can be found in config/environment.rb, and I just comment it out (it was set to 1.2.3 in both projects). Both applications still seem to work, perhaps I would get newer and better scaffolds if I would have generated them under 2.0.2, who knows.
Ruby on Rails notes / tom@mmto.org