> I'm also of the opinion that compiling assets in production as a part of your deployment process is insane, there's so much magic in the Rails asset pipeline that it's not uncommon to turn up bugs where tables don't exist, and the rails app can't initialize, or some javascript runtime environment isn't found which can leave your deployment in a broken state.

This is one of the pain points for me. Even when everything is setup, the asset compilation churns the disks and takes way too much cpu. I would rather do that on my local machine than disrupt the production server. I do a simple workaround for that:

    namespace :deploy do
      namespace :assets do
        desc 'Run the precompile task locally and rsync to shared'
        task :precompile, :roles => :web, :except => { :no_release => true } do
          run_locally "rake assets:precompile"
          run_locally 'rsync -e "ssh -i production.pem" --recursive --times --rsh=ssh --compress --human-readable --progress public/assets #{user}@#{host}:#{shared_path}'
          run_locally "rake assets:clean"
        end
      end
    end