my  block

where uzairs roam

So here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: the ORM facility that RoR provides is highly touted, particularly with regards to schema migrations, which are basically handled automatically. Clearly, these are great features for a fast-evolving project, but do they promote a more casual attitude towards reliability in open-source projects?

I ask this because my blog runs on the fabulous Typo engine. I chose this over Wordpress primarily because it doesn’t run on PHP and because (to paraphrase Biggie) mo’ AJAX mo’ fun. I felt justified when Basel, a certified geek, visited and left an ‘ooh, purdy’ message, and my initial unease at having to make time to knuckle through CSS and Ruby to create a half-decent theme  (the default, Azure, is a POC that continues to be tolerated for reasons not clear to me) was solved when the awesome TypoGarden competition came about. I gleefully tabbed the beautiful Hemingway theme as my chosen theme, thinking I would, in time, make the minor modifications to it I wanted to see.

And this, friends, is where the problems began. Typo’s still undergoing some pretty major changes, and since Azure’s the only theme that’s bundled with Typo, that’s the only one guaranteed to work. Each time I’ve done an ’svn up’, my blog has gone down with an ‘Application Error: Typo failed to start properly’ error. The community’s great in helping to troubleshoot problems and suggesting solutions, but that’s bare mitigation.

So, who’s to blame? The Typo maintainers? Certainly not, they’re contributing their time and effort with no material benefit to point to. Maybe Kyle, the creator of Hemingway, then? Well, again, the dude contributed his time willingly and for little gain, so I can’t bring myself to point fingers his way.

Could RoR be the problem? (Brace yourself, this is a massive over-simplification, but you know what I mean.) Open-source projects are, almost by definition, distributed. Code is produced and examined by many contributors, and often borrowed for use elsewhere, or leveraged to produce spinoffs or add/plug-ins. This latter case is where the problem lies: the dependency on the core project means that any architectural changes necessarily propagate, which can wreak havoc for end-users. You might argue that this is the case for all projects, RoR or not, and I wouldn’t argue.

But I would still wonder if the flippancy with which RoR lets you make such sweeping changes, albeit the hallmark of its much-trumpeted ease-of-use, makes it a tricky platform for open-source projects.