Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now?<p>What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the <i>privilege</i> of reading the mailing list for an <i>open source</i> project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to <i>start</i> it?<p>Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network. Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was.<p>Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't want to start working until they scale it.<p>Stop this. This is <i>really</i> bad.<p>[1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers.<p>What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"? What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?
As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it.<p>Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies.<p>The hard part is installing the exact <i>same</i> Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact <i>same</i> Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them.<p>In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be <i>harmful</i>, just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself.<p>I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that.<p><i>If</i> you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything.<p>For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...
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.<p>Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.
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.<p>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?
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.<p>Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".
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?)
oh god yes please I am a rails n00b who tried fooling with Rails a couple weeks ago and found the installation process INTENSELY FRUSTRATING. Especially compared to the unthinking ease of MAMP.<p>Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications (and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible.<p><i>pledges ten bucks</i>
<p><pre><code> PLEDGE $100 OR MORE
The previous rewards, plus access to the internal list for the project,
where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this.
</code></pre>
This feels awkward. Paying for this seems very much unlike the OSS model. Not that I'm complaining, but it threw me off a bit.
I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady (<a href="https://github.com/joshfng/railsready" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joshfng/railsready</a>) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu boxes and it has never been more than one click.
As Rails founding fathers complained of Java frameworks bloat, today's micro-framework fans complain of Rails bloat. Quite a cycle we've come through, isn't it ?
If someone won't make the effort to learn how to get an environment up and running, what makes him think that environment will have any real user once it's ready? There's a certain value of the commitment one takes when they decide to push forward and figure things out necessary to proceed.
I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was.<p>And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that:<p>1. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work.<p>2. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are <i>not</i> new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing.<p>But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails.<p>Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development <i>and</i> scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.
Setting up a vagrant script would be worth more. Portable development environment (Ubuntu running in a virtual box), cross platform support, easily configurable and duplicatable, and segregated from host machine.<p>You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't deal with that, use vagrant.<p>P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that with whatever he's going to do.
I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production environment.
So did DHH give permission to use the Rails logo for this project?????<p>"The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case, you're on the way to lose your trademark.
So I only grant promotional use for products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution."<p><a href="http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-to-use-of-rails-logo-567.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-t...</a>
I think crowd sourcing is a great idea. Being a professional programmer doesn't mean doing it for 120 hours a week. I'm more than happy to throw a little bit of money at something like this to have a good job be done of it.<p>Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame.<p>I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25 to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is:<p>* I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself.
* It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves.
* Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from.<p>This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to focus on this and I can't wait for the result.
I decided to learn Rails this week, and just went through the process of following <a href="http://railstutorial.com" rel="nofollow">http://railstutorial.com</a> (actually I'm about half through it.)<p>The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two, and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow, following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby.<p>I, for one, do not see the need for this.
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.
Installing Rails on OSX is trivial. If one really needs this process streamlined, maybe you shouldn't be coding? Or maybe you should just stop using a computer?<p>Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front page that has no business here.<p>I thought this was <i>hacker</i> news. Seems more like "check out my super cool project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(
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:<p><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-client-for-mac-os-x/comments" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-c...</a><p>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.<p>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.
Im all for opening doors to newbies, and I think udacity and coursera are leading the way in that regard.<p>But if people desire to become programmers is it really that bad to have them come in contact with a little bit of configuration and head scratching.
I used this guide: <a href="http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby-mac" rel="nofollow">http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby...</a> when getting started, which was pretty painless.<p>There's also a GUI for RVM called Jewelry Box which makes handling gem sets and ruby versions easy: <a href="http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox" rel="nofollow">http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox</a><p>I think the money would be better spent on creating a comprehensive beginners guide since the 4th edition of Agile Web Development with Rails is lacking.
I think that installing and configuring a database like Postgres or MySQL would be useful since it's often a non-trivial step in getting a production app ready (e.g. for Heroku).
OSS development has to be funded somewhere and to date it has been the benevolence of bigger organisations that have awarded grants or developer time. This gives the opportunity for a developer to offer to solve a problem and for the community to vote with their pockets. It empowers developers and the community to get behind a problem space and if people don't want it it won't happen.
JRuby will be in GSoC, and may also have a separate "summer of code" via an as-yet-unnamed benefactor. Perhaps we should just get Yehuda to mentor a student to build a single "Rails.app" that runs on <i>all</i> platforms, rather than just OS X?<p><a href="http://jruby.org/gsoc" rel="nofollow">http://jruby.org/gsoc</a>
Seems like this is connected to rails 4 release:
sidebar:
"and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers."
What about on a virtual private server like at linode? Then one doesn't necessarily have to shell out for a Mac to run osx.<p>I would be much more interested in that.
I don't know. There are many good observations about what happened to Rails the last years in the comments. Rails is complicated and to get fluent in Rails takes some time. But this complexity came with a great flexibility. And that's a sign that we are facing a phenomenal ecosystem. I admit starting rails is frustrating, so many new concepts but everything like rvm has a reason why and even beginners will realize this quickly.<p>Yehuda's approach reminds me of the early days of webdevelopment where you could install a WAMP stack with one click on your windows systems. I never liked those one-click-installers—you don't know what happens to your system and deinstalling was a nightmare with still running db servers somewhere for years.<p>You can't wipe away Rails complicated entry with such an one click-installer. After you installed Rails with one click things aren't getting easier your still have to figure out next steps and which frameworks to choose (i.e. ERB or HAML, SCSS or LESS, MySQL or Postgre, etc.). Or something breaks within rvm: with an yehuda's approach you are completely clueless because you don't know anything about rvm, gemsets because the installer did all the work for you.<p>Sometimes there is even too much magic in Rails. I am still wondering if ActiveRecord is too much abstraction and if there are better more direct ORMs like DataMapper, I am used to ActiveRecord but still I can not fluently create data models, there's always something I forget, using the plural or singular, saving the updated migration, rolling back the migration, etc. Otherwise it's far beyond any ORM from other Frameworks I have ever seen in terms of speed. And its usage in Ruby is very consistent. Also Rails shell commands are very consistent, once you understand the rails syntax (like rails generate or destroy something you can quickly build anything in minutes), I tried several times to find something similar with python/django but there the entries seemed to me even more complicated, don't follow any system and felt restricted, i.e. Django's automatic Backend (no offense, i know not enough about django and python to say anything serious but that was just my first impression).<p>Another last great example of Rails: once you managed to install Rails, just put haml, less, less-bootstrap-rails and simple_form in your gemfile and run bundle. with this setup you can build web apps in minutes with perfect design and they are fully customizable. some years ago you needed hours or days to get to similar results. It takes time to get there but once you are there you have the power.<p>this pace and variety in the rails ecosystem comes from so many talented people who contribute. trying to set one standard for how things are done would slow down this pace.<p>finally, I think that Yehuda doesn't want to raise money, he just wants to get attention and the approval that he had the right idea.
I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here:<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a><p>The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.'<p>If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money.<p>Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-)<p>Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before.<p>(If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.)<p>Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance:<p><a href="https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop</a><p><a href="http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack" rel="nofollow">http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack</a><p><a href="https://github.com/joshfng/railsready" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joshfng/railsready</a><p>So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard!<p>I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read <a href="http://railstutorial.com/" rel="nofollow">http://railstutorial.com/</a><p>But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter:<p><a href="http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/185134250050334720" rel="nofollow">http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472...</a><p>Step 1: make Rails hard<p>Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy<p>Step 3: PROFIT