Pervasive Code

I just brought a new project into the world of autotest. I’m not using the Leopard FSEvents “fix” because it’s not necessary (note the sleep and add_exception calls below). I am using the fun and helpful sound plugin, but not the playlist version of that plugin. Here’s my .autotest file.
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I’ve seen a few Rake tasks for Rcov that work OK, but which fail in an interesting way (if you care about coverage): they give your coverage metrics an unexpected boost if you have 0% coverage in one or more source files.

Huh? Exactly. If you have 500 source files, and your test suite only requires one of them, then you get a free ride on those 499 files that have 0% coverage. Theoretically you could get 100% coverage in your report even though 499 source files are not touched at all. D’oh!
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Ruby’s Kernel.require method will re-require the same source file if you pass it differing arguments that point to the same file. It doesn’t use File.expand_path to make sure it hasn’t already loaded the same file before. This can cause problems if you’re using constants or doing one-time initialization in a source file that’s getting loaded multiple times for one reason; you’ll need to add a wrapper that prevents re-entry.

If this annoys you as much as it does me (why should my application code include workarounds for what I regard to be a Ruby bug?), add this snippet to your config/environment.rb (pre Rails 2.0) or config/preinitializer.rb (Rails 2.0 or later).
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The Ruby on Rails story is usually presented to the new developer as a wonderful break from tradition that makes a developer’s life so much better than the frameworks of the past. The clattering of skeletons in the closet you’re hearing? Well, that’s because it makes the sysadmin’s life much worse than PHP or Java. That just improved on Friday, with the release of mod_rails. If you’re looking for a way to do shared (or low traffic) hosting of Rails applications, this is for you.
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Just a quick note: acts_as_tsearch needs some guidance to work with PostgreSQL 8.3 due to changes in tsearch2 integration.
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