TLDR: Definitely worth upgrading. Approximately hundreds of small bug fixes, across much of Rails. The fixes include some important ones for database types, time comparisons, thread issues, record reloading, etc. IMHO these fixes address dozens of bugs that could cause major puzzlement for a typical Rails developer. Thanks to all the contributors for excellent work on this release.
> IMHO these fixes address dozens of bugs that could cause major puzzlement for a typical Rails developer. That has been the reason I always avoid huge frameworks like RoR. If I was to hit a bug like this, I wouldn't know where to start debugging. How do people deal with obscure bugs in the framework with something like RoR?
Then you share the test case in a bug report, and collaborate to fix it. Fixing it usually involves a source code dive.
With Rails's reasonably well documented and reasonably well written codebase it's usually possible to grok the source and dependencies even coming to it cold. With the possible exception of arel.
Ruby's dirty tricks department (monkey-patching third-party objects) and duck typing together are a real boon to debugging.