Kickstarter: rails.app • Hacker News Board

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#21

Post by ericd » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:50 PM UTC

ajacksified wrote: post #19

tptacek wrote: post #8

I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running. Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

As a fairly recent OSX and a fairly recent Rails user, I had no trouble learning either. That is, except for Lion and XCode 4.2/4.3, which caused me about three lost days. 'rvm get head' and 'rvm install 1.9.3-head' fixed that, though.

I would say that that three lost days getting set up is a large, large problem for Rails, though.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#22

Post by apurvamehta » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady (https://github.com/joshfng/railsready) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu boxes and it has never been more than one click.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#23

Post by DamnYuppie » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

Having been a Rails developer I don't have much trouble getting Rails up and going on a system. However I do have several friends who seem to have no end of trouble getting theirs setup working reliably. Given they are not full time developers, but they complain about how hard it is to get everything configured so I can see how useful something like this can be for many people looking to try out Rails.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#24

Post by msluyter » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #8

I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running. Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

I've done it recently and it wasn't too bad, with the help of rvm. Getting the entire ecosystem (git, heroku, postgres, etc...) running is a bit more work, but pretty straightforward.

Perhaps part of the confusion is that there are a number of old blog posts that you'll dig up via google, and if you make the mistake of following an older one, you'll run into problems. I made this mistake trying to get rails set up on Ubuntu before I knew about rvm, and it was pretty painful.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#25

Post by jwarzech » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:52 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #18

jwarzech wrote: post #14

I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work on it?)

He's taking time off of work to do this: https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056

Well I guess I should have just asked him :) At least he didn't agree to your other assumptions as to how the money will be used.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#26

Post by Cushman » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:53 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #8

I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running. Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

> "gem update --system; gem install rails"

That'll throw a permissions error on a default OS X install-- and your Rails newbie will definitely not know that that means "you should really use rvm".

With that said-- a shell script that installs homebrew, git, rvm, the latest ruby, the latest rails, and a handful of useful gems, then drops you right into a shell of you brand spankin' new Rails (and Heroku!) project seems... pretty straightforward. Dealing with the common edge error cases and making it look nice and user friendly might take a couple hours. I'm curious to see where the time gets spent on this project.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#27

Post by spicyj » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:57 PM UTC

joshaidan wrote: post #7

I propose a different funding model for this project. Why not approach Rails hosting vendors like Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. to fund this project, in exchange for built-in one-click deployment to their hosting environment. Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.

Presumably they can consider the $10k sponsorship option if they want something like that.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#28

Post by driverdan » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #8

I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running. Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

I installed rvm + some gems for the first time 4-5 months ago and ran into all kinds of problems. IIRC the problems stemmed from poor documentation, not poor tools. The existing tools work just fine. The problem was that the docs and intro guides are not written for someone who knows absolutely nothing about Ruby development.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#29

Post by benatkin » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 10:02 PM UTC

It has a link to Yehuda's profile in the sidebar, where it shows that he's funded two KickStarter projects. One of them is this:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-c...

Why shouldn't this turn out the same way? The person who started the HubCap project is a prolific open source contributor. I'm glad he didn't drop everything else to work on HubCap, as he made many great contributions to API client development last year.

I hope Yehuda changes his mind about this sooner rather than later. I really like seeing what Yehuda comes up with and this doesn't interest me at all. I use the command line, and I recommend homebrew to anyone on OS X who's serious about learning ruby, and so far it hasn't failed me. I've seen the Google App Engine launcher and I think it's pretty good but I still prefer the command-line tools.

Re: Kickstarter: rails.app

#30

Post by driverdan » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 10:05 PM UTC

If there's someone I'd trust to do a project like this through Kickstarter it's Yehuda. And since his time isn't cheap I understand the $25,000 price tag.

To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the same, possibly taking a little longer?