有所有依赖关系的rails版本升级的最佳实践是什么？

Question

whenever some major rails version bump happens, sometimes its real pain to upgrade existing apps for rails (4.x, 5.x etc), given there are plenty of gems which might depend on older versions of rails (ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActiveModel, etc.). And those dependent gems sometimes takes too much time to be upgrade (either not maintained, less active or unavailability of core maintainer team, even for accepting Pull Requests). What is the solution which people around follows for the same?

One workflow which people suggest is fork all the dependent gems and then change whatever you like and keep updating them from their respective master/main branches. I would love to hear what people follow in their workflow.

Answer 1

I would argue that you should remove/replace gems that do not have a compatible version available shortly after a major Rails update.

Beta versions of Rails 5 were available almost 6 months before Rails 5 was released. If a gem doesn't update within that time it will probably not be updated later on or it will slow do down on every other Rails update as well.

I see several options when you run into that situation:

• Revisit the reason why you are using that gem. Sometimes you use a gem for a few simple methods. Rewrite those methods in your application (or your own gem) and remove this dependency.

• Are there other projects available that solve the same problem? Sometimes these projects even have a better structure or other benefits. You might consider switching to that gems. Hopefully, you encapsulated the old gem and didn't customize that gem too much, because that makes it harder to replace it.

• You might consider forking that gem and fixing the problem yourself (bonus points for sending a pull request to the original gem). That is an okay solution in the short-term. But you will very like have a similar issue with this gem with the next Ruby version. Furthermore, when you work with a forked version of a gem, you are on your own. Do you really want to maintain that private gem version for the following years?

With every gem that you add to your stack, there is a cost and a risk coming into your application. The cost of watching that gem, how does it change, are there security fixes? And the risk that the gem will be abandoned at some time.

There might be some things you can do upfront to decrease the pain when you run into situations like this:

• Avoid adding gems to your application, when you only need a few simple helper methods from that gem.

• Encapsulate that gem with your own wrapper. And have good test coverage for your wrappers interface. That makes it much easier to change the underlying gem.

• Always be prepared to remove/replace gems as soon as you face a problem with them. Waiting for an external gem maintainer is probably not a good strategy when you have problems in your application to solve.