Uncompatible Systems

swiftiply 0.6.1.1 with mongrel 1.0.1 should not be used on a production web site, lest you will be left with no running mongrel processes after a while. How do I know this, you may ask? I know it because it happened to me. The swiftiply evented mongrel server cannot handle an HTTP request for a proxy. This makes sense considering that it is not a proxy, though rather than dropping this request on the floor and moving along, the mongrel process throws an exception, which is not caught in the code and dies. Just like that, with no warning. See you later HTTP server.

Inspecting the code in the latest prerelease, the evented_mongrel.rb file has not been changed to handle this situation any more gracefully. For the time being, evented mongrel has been removed from production. Just like that.

I began a project with rails 2.0 on a Debian testing box. The goal at this point is to see how few packages I have to install to get a running Rails/PostgreSQL web application configured with some default scaffolding.

Good news is ruby on rails is available via APT. Good news, or so I thought, is that ruby-postgres is also available via APT. Unfortunately, there appears to be some kind of discrepency between this, as rails fails to load the database driver with a kind error:

MissingSourceFile in AssetsController#index
no such file to load -- postgres

Dare I install the gem and break my almost perfect run? I shall :(