What would cause this migration to hang?

Question

I'm trying to upgrade an old 1.2.6 Rails application to 2.3.8, and I'm running into a bit of a snag with migrations. Namely, if I have something like ModelName.create(:foo => "bar") in the migration, the migration doesn't complete. It doesn't hit an infinite loop or anything. It just refuses to complete that migration.

Here's some sample code.

This works:

class CreateNewsArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :news_articles, :force => true do |t|
      t.string  "name"
      t.string  "image"
      t.text    "body"
      t.boolean "featured", :default => "0"
      t.integer "position"
      t.timestamps
    end
    # Section.create(:name => 'News Articles', :controller => 'news_articles', :description => 'Add, edit, and delete news articles.')
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :news_articles
    Section.find_by_name('News Articles').destroy
  end
end

Uncommenting the Section.create(...) means the migration never completes.

Here's the output from rake db:migrate --trace:

** Invoke db:migrate (first_time)
** Invoke environment (first_time)
** Execute environment
** Execute db:migrate
==  CreateNewsArticles: migrating =============================================
-- create_table(:news_articles, {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0531s

And after commenting out the Section.create

** Invoke db:migrate (first_time)
** Invoke environment (first_time)
** Execute environment
** Execute db:migrate
==  CreateNewsArticles: migrating =============================================
-- create_table(:news_articles, {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0479s
==  CreateNewsArticles: migrated (0.0481s) ====================================

** Invoke db:schema:dump (first_time)
** Invoke environment 
** Execute db:schema:dump

I've tried this on another computer, and it works. Same version of rake, same version of ruby, and rails is frozen.

rake --VERSION: rake, version 0.8.7, ruby -v: ruby 1.8.6 (2010-02-05 patchlevel 399) [i686-darwin10.3.0], rails -v: Rails 2.3.8

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Apparently using ruby 1.8.6-p399 was the culprit. Switching to 1.8.6-p369 solved it.

Answer 2

You might also try defining a bar-bones section model in the migration.