new to Rails, new to Goldberg, asking for advice

[Shinmaikeru]

I work for a college in Japan, and we have received Ministry of
Education money for a project that includes redoing our db app,
rewriting it in Rails and adding a bunch of student support features.
Part of the grant pledge is that we will release the code as open
source in Summer or Fall of next year.

The developers we have chosen want to use Goldberg for authentication
and authorization because it:
- Allows controller-level access control.
- Features a GUI for authorizing which actors can access which
controllers.
- Keeps db tables of the controllers, actors (like user groups), and
user-controller associations, so adding a new actor does not require
modifying code in each controller.

Assuming that I am not misunderstanding them, I want to use it, too.
This is very close to what I had planned to add to our current PHP-
based system... before I decided to chuck the damn thing and begin
again in Rails.

But they told me that we will have to use Rails 2.0 because Goldberg
isn't compatible with anything higher, so I looked into it and found
http://rubyforge.org/projects/goldberg/
and was alarmed because it looks really, really dead and because
compatibility stops at Rails 2.0., meaning we wouldn't be able to use
the I18N API introduced in version 2.2.

I did contact Dave Nelson, who was very kind and assured me that
others are using it, but I did not ask him about >2.0 compatibility.

Forgive my ignorance, as I am just getting into the Rails world and
any mistakes made with Ministry grant money can end in the school
paying the money back, so let please let me confirm.

As I understand it from
http://github.com/lardawge/goldberg
your branch will work with ROR 2.3, right?
And even
http://github.com/urbanus/goldberg
works with ROR 2.2, correct?

The developers have already done work based on the older 2.0 Goldberg,
and they don't want to redo what they have done because government
delays have left us with a very tight dev schedule.

Obviously, you have updated the code, so a lot of the internals have
changed, but will it be much work to switch to one of these two newer
branches? In other words, has much changed in the interface or use of
Goldberg that would affect our design?

[Shinmaikeru]

> The developers have already done work based on the older 2.0 Goldberg,
> and they don't want to redo what they have done because government
> delays have left us with a very tight dev schedule.

After quite a lot of negotiation, research reports about cross-site
scripting exploits in Rails 2.2, and some info directly from Matz
about the roadmap for Ruby 2.0, the final decision was made to go with
Rails 2.0 + Goldberg + gettext plugin. Dev time savings and the
maturity of Rails 2.0 won out in the end.

Though it seems like the matter is solved, if anyone has any strong
opinions, I would still love to hear them... especially if they are
along the lines of "Wait, you're making a big mistake."

Thank you.