AssetNotPrecompiledError for missing assets - really?

[Pascal Friederich]

I migrated one of my projects to from Rails 3.0 to 3.2.1 which means
I'm using the asset pipeline for the first time.
As much as I like the ease of compressing and minifying my assets the
more I'm annoyed about its behavior to raise an
AssetNotPrecompiledError as soon as, well, there's an asset that's not
precompiled.

Can somebody explain me the reason why this is considered to be a good
idea?
For something as trivial as a missing image file the app fails
completely instead of just falling back to "old style" image_tag
behavior (images/foo.png vs assets/foo.png) and maybe produce an error
log line. Even a missing js or css file
isn't necessarily a showstopper. At least the app would still be
usable for a user until the "problem" gets fixed.

I just cant see the benefit of this new behavior.

What am I missing out here?

cheers

[Peter Vandenabeele]

Maybe this option can help you:

   # Don't fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed

  config.assets.compile = false

from http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html .

It's off (false) by default, but if you wanted you could turn it on.

In that case, you probably need to make this group

in your Gemfile

# Gems used only for assets and not required

# in production environments by default.

group :assets do

  gem 'sass-rails'

  gem 'coffee-rails'

  gem 'uglifier'

  gem 'bootstrap-sass'

end

also available in production (which would mean to put it

outside of the :assets group).

HTH,

Peter