A Week of Extreme Core Team

Ruby on Rails has been from the mountain top to death valley, this week. From the high of being included in Apple’s next version of the Macintosh operating system, to the low of a second straight day of mandatory security upgrades, the members of the Core Team, and especially DHH, must have had a rather stressful week. Let’s hope next week is a little less exciting.

Bundling rails in Leopard will lower the barriers to entry for non-command-line-enabled Mac users. It kind of seems unfair that future converts won’t get to dance through a minefield of unix-style software installations to try to get rails up on their development systems. Pre-loaded ruby, rails and mongrel are almost like cheating. Where is the learning in that? Oh, well. I guess the bad old days had to end sometime.

The security hole will certainly get more ink than it probably deserves. The impact of a must-patch hole is certainly lessened by the propensity of rails developers to maintain their own systems. Adding multiple levels of department approvals and paperwork would certainly slow the collective reaction time. This event will be more valuable for the future preparedness it will force than it will be destructive in and of itself. If that is the case, then the 10 minutes it took me to patch my various systems will have been well-spent.