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Comment by grabastic | Hacker News Reader

How do you minify and concatenate your files in your projects? Part of a deploy/build script? Commit hooks? Manually? Do you do it at all? What about compiling Sass and CoffeeScript?

The asset pipeline is not arrogance it's convenience. If you have a better system for those tasks then you shouldn't use the pipeline, but for a lot of people the asset pipeline saves time and results in a faster, better experience for their end users.

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Completely agree. However, instead of bundling one asset pipeline into rails that is "aggressive" like Sprockets about getting into everything, they should have said "here's a connector" where you can attach the "asset pipeline" of your choice and let the community create the tools it needs for different scenarios, such as one asset pipeline for thin clients and another for think clients. Or separate asset pipelines for sass/css and coffeescript/javascript.

Bundling a default that doesn't play well with lots of the client-side innovations hurts rails more than helps.

The asset pipeline as it is currently designed is monolithic and an all or nothing approach.

I got downvoted into oblivion (deservedly so) because of my snark. But this is essentially the point I was trying to make. Rails is good at ruby. It was never good at javascript. Remember rjs? Remember inlining ajax handlers? Now we have default coffee script and sass file _per_ view. I know they mean well but javascript is its own beast! I really don't want to have to consciously disable all these things that are supposed to "be convenient" just because I know my way around javascript enough to not co-mangle it in with ruby.

+1. I've watched people reinvent the asset pipeline on top of the asset pipeline.

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