ruby/rails update

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Hi,

As mentioned on the other list, I'm planning to push ruby up to 1.9.3 and rails up to 3.2.x soon. 

As you know if you develop in the rails world, letting this sort of thing become too stale eventually leads to problems with gems that you're using starting to develop dependency problems and so forth. 

I actually think that the combination of these two will be much simpler than going from rails 2.3 to 3.0, but famous last words. 

The ways where 1.8.7 and 1.9.3 differ are mostly in edges and corners, and provided that one has tried to avoid the use of such (as I have in my code, anticipating that this would come sometime) there should be little problem. I can't speak for code written before mine. There is also potential for mischief when the switch forces a significant change in a gem (e.g. because there is an old series that supports 1.8.7 and a new series that doesn't).  That's a bit harder to predict.

I'm less familiar with going from Rails 3.0 to 3.2. I think the big difference is the introduction of the asset pipeline in 3.1. It's possible that the current code will just work without taking the asset pipeline into account, although certainly I'd like to migrate to it for the advantages that it affords. I think I'll have a better handle there when I try it. In particular it'll be really nice if we can clean up CSS via the asset pipeline, as traditional CSS has always been a mess.

So I just wanted to let anyone interested in development know what's in store here.

Howard