What are the benefits of using the Rails gem instead od vendor/rails?

Question

I recently started working on a small personal project in Ruby on Rails, and have run into a few things that I couldn't find definitive answers for. If anyone here is knowledgeable enough to help, that would be greatly appreciated. All of my questions are below:

• What benefit is there to using the Rails Gem instead of having it in vendor/rails?
• Is there any benefit to using Rails 2.3.2? Some of the plugins I hoped to use don't seem to be compatible with 2.3.2 (ActiveScaffold)? Does it offer a great improvement over 2.2?
• What is the benefit of using Ruby 1.9? Many plugins aren't yet compatible. Does it offer a great improvement over older versions?

Thanks for any help you guys might be able to offer.

Answer 1

1. vendor/rails probably makes your project more portable. Deployments that run the rake gems:install can act kind of wonky, especially if you upgrade a "Framework Gem" (you have to do these manually).

   The downside to vendor/rails is that it makes your deployment slightly bigger (more files that have to be pushed) but if you use git and something like Capistrano, this only bites you on the initial deploy... but its not that bad.

2. I don't think there are any huge benefits; it just depends on if you need features from 2.3.2. Obviously you want to try to run the latest version to make upgrades less painful. I've found that you always need to be upgrading the framework underneath Rails if you want to have any change of upgrading in the future.

3. Performance. As you pointed out though, a lot of plugins are broken. This is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem but overtime this should fix itself. We're not running 1.9 yet in any of our production apps because its too unstable with the rest of the stack.

Answer 2

I'll address the gem question.

I've used vendored gems in the past but I have pretty much moved away from it except in the rare case where I need to fork a gem to customize it for some purpose in which case I would vendor the gem.

The main reason not to vendor from my perspective is that you can't cleanly vendor any gems with C modules since they require compilation.

A really good option is to use a gem management tool such as geminstaller, it lets you configure the gems and specific versions of gems that your project works against so that you have a consistent set of gems on your deployment.

Answer 3

What benefit is there to using the Rails Gem instead of having it in vendor/rails?

The biggest benefit is that you do not carry around the full rails source code with your project, the other benefit is that moving to a newer version of rails is going to involve less effort.

Keep in mind that the gem command will allow you to install a specific version of a gem.

Is there any benefit to using Rails 2.3.2? Some of the plugins I hoped to use don't seem to be compatible with 2.3.2 (ActiveScaffold)? Does it offer a great improvement over 2.2?

A lot has changed from rails 2.2 to 2.3.2, there are also a bunch of security, performance and bug fixes. ActiveScaffold is compatible with rails 2.3.2, as are most of the plugins out there. If you are starting a new project I would recommend using the latest and greatest.

What is the benefit of using Ruby 1.9? Many plugins aren't yet compatible. Does it offer a great improvement over older versions?

Ruby 1.9 is much faster than Ruby 1.8.x, however adoption of 1.9 is not that high. Rails 2.3.2 works just fine on Ruby 1.9, however there are some plugins and gems that do not. Make sure you read this stackoverflow question on the topic.