Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
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Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
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Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#2That timezone issue (further described here: http://www.benjaminoakes.com/2010/11/23/rails-timezones/ ) sound like an odd one - anyone know what the underlying cause of the problem is?
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#3That timezone issue (further described here: http://www.benjaminoakes.com/2010/11/23/rails-timezones/ ) sound like an odd one - anyone know what the underlying cause of the problem is?
In 2007 DST changed and Mexico did not follow suit, so the short PST/EST/CST timezones were not specific enough anymore. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Time_Zone):
Effective in the US in 2007 as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the local time changes from PST to PDT at 02:00 LST to 03:00 LDT on the second Sunday in March and the time returns at 02:00 LDT to 01:00 LST on the first Sunday in November. Canada would also acknowledge this change. In Mexico, beginning in 2010, the portion of the country in this time zone uses the extended dates, as do some other parts. The vast majority of Mexico, however, still uses the old dates.
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#4I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells.
Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
Date January 4, 2012
Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months?
> Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess. Each instance had its own set of gems and its own versions of those gems. Naturally, none of the instances matched.
How did this happen?
> Tobi listed every controller in our app at the time and divided them among the engineers. The engineers went through the templates used by each controller and made sure string output in templates was marked as html_safe or rendered with raw where appropriate.
Most of the XSS work was done in a single day with all of the engineers' help, but there was cleanup on pages that weren't used very often that continued for several weeks after installing the plugin.
Why look at the controller granularity for templating bugs? If any controllers share a partial or helper, you may have engineers stepping on each others' toes.
Also, shouldn't these simple bugs be quickly and fully discovered by automated tests?
> We knew the real upgrade required major code changes, so four engineers started the upgrade on a Saturday afternoon when there were minimal changes being committed. We asked other engineers to hold off on changes over the weekend to prevent any merge nightmares.
If the upgrade is done on a branch, why must the work be completed during the weekend?
And why must you block changes generally for an entire weekend because of work done to a single branch?
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#5I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells. Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0 Date January 4, 2012 Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months? > Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess.…
> Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months?
They switched to 3.0 quite some time ago:
> Our production instances made the final switch in the week leading up to Thanksgiving
Writing this blog post probably wasn't very high priority.
> How did this happen?
Maybe they were busy creating a great product instead of obsessing about perfect architecture and optimising prematurely?
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#6I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells. Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0 Date January 4, 2012 Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months? > Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess.…
From what I understand, the convention in the rails community has been to upgrade from 2.x -> 3.0 -> 3.1.x than to go full bore 2.3 -> 3.0.
Edit- left out a word
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#7I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells. Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0 Date January 4, 2012 Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months? > Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess.…
> Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months?
Like mentioned in another comment, upgrading from 2.3.x to 3.0.x is a feat in itself. Upgrading from 2.3 to 3.1 might be doable on a smaller project, but with code written in several versions of Rails we decided to go 2.3 > 3.0 > 3.1.
> Also, shouldn't these simple bugs be quickly and fully discovered by automated tests?
There was plenty of HTML inside Ruby statements in our templates that started being escaped. Something like:
10) ? 'Expensive!' : 'Cheap' %>
while ugly was not wrong. This is a very simple version of some of the problems we saw, and there were typically several per template. Writing tests that check the HTML output of template files would be unmaintainable.
> If the upgrade is done on a branch, why must the work be completed during the weekend?
To avoid a big merge. We changed a lot of files and didn't want to have to re-check our work after letting Git auto-merge our changes.
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#8I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells. Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0 Date January 4, 2012 Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months? > Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess.…
> Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months? They switched to 3.0 quite some time ago: > Our production instances made the final switch in the week leading up to Thanksgiving Writing this blog post probably wasn't very high priority. > How did this happen? Maybe they were busy creating a great product instead of obsessing about perfect architect…
Maybe they were busy creating a great product instead of obsessing about perfect architecture and optimising prematurely?
I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who believes that ensuring all of the servers are running the same code is a 'premature optimization'.
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#9I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells. Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0 Date January 4, 2012 Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months? > Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess.…
3.0.x is more different from 2.3 than 3.1 is to 3.0.
Re: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
#10Thanks for the post but I just worry our app won't be as easy to upgrade. We've got a Rails 2.3 app that I'd really love to upgrade ...
Did you not encounter any gems/plugins that broke after the upgrade? (we've got a hacked version of attachment_fu for images)