I appreciate the post and am a huge fan of Yehuda, he used my comments as teeing off points for your remarks but I feel that what I was trying to say has been lost in his response, probably because I was unclear.
Lets start with this ...
"The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it’s a personal playground"
This was said more in frustration with the coffeescript/sass decision than any real belief that it really was the case.
I understand it may be hurtful and disparaging of the amazing effort that the Rails core team has dedicated to making Rails fantastic, and I apologize unreservedly.
With respect to outlining the changes (prototype to jquery etc), I'm not complaining about the changes per se (because I like most of them), what I'm complaining about is the pace of the changes.
Something as major as the asset pipelining feature (where you move assets out of the public folder and into the app folder), for example, seems big enough that it should be a 3.2 release not the next release after an already major change in 3.0.
See what I'm saying?
I haven't worked on the Rails core, so this can be taken with a pinch of salt, but I feel like it would be a good idea to adopt the Intel tick tock refresh style of cpu releases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock, where major releases come out on the 'tock' and are refined on the 'tick'. That would work well for Rails releases, giving major releases enough time to settle into the Rails consciousness before the next set of changes comes down.
It was great to get a thorough explanation of the rationalization behind the decisions that have been made recently, it would be awesome to see that increase in frequency.
I just want to thank the Rails team for all the hard work and have them understand that while I may argue hard for what I believe, that I have nothing but the highest regard for them.
On coffeescript and sass, I guess I'm just a blind-following zombie fanboy that does whatever the Rails team tells me. I moved all my javascript to coffeescript and css to sass, it was love at first sight and in my mind it was the best decision ever. I know it was all available long before 3.1, I had played with both but never in real projects, and having it baked-in makes it easy for me.
I guess I'm basically just an end user, I like to use technology that's vouched-for and I trust the Rails team. Rails suits me.
>> Something as major as the asset pipelining feature (where you move assets out of the public folder and into the app folder), for example, seems big enough that it should be a 3.2 release not the next release after an already major change in 3.0.
What's the difference between putting it in 3.1 vs. 3.2? Is the 3.2 version number somehow more substantial than 3.1?
Also there have been quite a few releases after 3.0 - I believe the 3.0 branch is up to 3.0.8 now.
That doesn't make any sense; there isn't a fixed time between releases ala Chrome or OpenBSD. If you bump things back, earlier releases will happen sooner.
Do assets in public/ break in 3.1? Sure, it's encouraged, but I'm pretty sure if you tell your web server to point to public/ it will serve your static assets from there. As far as I know you can upgrade your existing rails app from 3.0 to 3.1 and start using asset pipelining on your own schedule.
It seems like you're not seeing the forest for the trees, with respect to what I'm saying.
I don't need help upgrading. I just think the Rails core team should do releases in such a way that big features which drastically change the way Rails does things, aren't put in the pipeline back to back, like this was (3.0, then 3.1) that way Rails doesn't get a reputation for constantly redoing the "Rails Way".
Lets start with this ...
"The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it’s a personal playground"
This was said more in frustration with the coffeescript/sass decision than any real belief that it really was the case.
I understand it may be hurtful and disparaging of the amazing effort that the Rails core team has dedicated to making Rails fantastic, and I apologize unreservedly.
With respect to outlining the changes (prototype to jquery etc), I'm not complaining about the changes per se (because I like most of them), what I'm complaining about is the pace of the changes.
Something as major as the asset pipelining feature (where you move assets out of the public folder and into the app folder), for example, seems big enough that it should be a 3.2 release not the next release after an already major change in 3.0.
See what I'm saying?
I haven't worked on the Rails core, so this can be taken with a pinch of salt, but I feel like it would be a good idea to adopt the Intel tick tock refresh style of cpu releases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock, where major releases come out on the 'tock' and are refined on the 'tick'. That would work well for Rails releases, giving major releases enough time to settle into the Rails consciousness before the next set of changes comes down.
It was great to get a thorough explanation of the rationalization behind the decisions that have been made recently, it would be awesome to see that increase in frequency.
I just want to thank the Rails team for all the hard work and have them understand that while I may argue hard for what I believe, that I have nothing but the highest regard for them.