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Comment by ionfish | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps some of the other Rails developers around here could satisfy my curiosity: when do you do the work (minor or major) to update your applications to use new releases? When the first or second RC comes out, or only once the 'official', final release is ready? Or are you tracking edge with an 'upgrade' branch or some equivalent?

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Generally speaking I upgrade whenever I get the chance, but I always wait for an official release. Sometimes I let some of my smaller apps lag, but I try to keep fairly recent so as not to hold back any other apps that might be relying on major external requirements, such as Passenger ("mod_rails").

In the past I used to track edge, but that proved to be far too cumbersome.

I test against the RC releases and have found some bugs that way.

This time, it was testing mod_rails that led me to testing my apps against Rails edge. I wanted to make sure I could run mod_rails on open solaris in this next release cycle, so I was running things on edge earlier than I typically do.

Also, there was (is) an issue with Rails 2.3 and paperclip due to changes in how Rake handles empty file fields. There's been back and forth between the three projects on who needs to fix what. At the moment, the latest paperclip should work against Rails 2.3.

I always update when the first RC comes out. I figure I can do my part and submit bug reports that way, but I've never actually run into any bugs. The RCs have been totally stable. Go figure.

We've been branching to a 2.x tree and slowly adapting to the latest stable release (up until yesterday 2.2.2). Surprisingly plugin compatibility was not the biggest issue we faced (and we use many plugins) - most problems caused by plugins were solved by installing newer version. Our biggest problems come from subtle changes in HAML syntax, which causes syntax errors in a myriad of views. As you can imagine, it's rather tedious to hunt down those incompatibilities, as our application is rather large.

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