
Kickstarter: rails.app - bretthopper
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp
======
blhack
Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right
now?

What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"?
Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the _privilege_ of reading the mailing list
for an _open source_ project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to _start_ it?

Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got
funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage
their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network.
Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was.

Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to
it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know
has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't
want to start working until they scale it.

Stop this. This is _really_ bad.

[1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the
project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open
source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input
will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced
developers.

What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"?
What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?

~~~
jacobian
Let me get this straight: so a prolific, proven open source contributor makes
some money, and the community gets a problem fixed. This is a bad thing? Who
loses here?

What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source -
would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the
software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the
source of the money, so are you against the idea of companies letting their
devs work on open source?

There's this attitude in the open source world that somehow developers getting
directly paid for open source is evil. This is -- excuse me -- fucking
bullshit. I can't think of anything better than the idea of developers getting
paid to write open source software. We need to grow the hell up and understand
that paying developers to write open sourced software is a _good thing_ \--
open source devs get money, and the community gets software. Again, who loses?

I don't use Rails, and I probably never will, yet I kicked in some money to
help see this through. I can think of about a million worse ways I could have
spent that cash.

~~~
tzumby
The problem here is the ego, you have to notice how Yehuda put an accent on
how important his contributions to rails 3 were. I'm not arguing they're not,
but as Plato put it, when you think you reached the absolute wisdom you
couldnt be further from it

~~~
jacobian
Oh, I see. So the problem isn't that Yehuda's asking for money, but that he
had the temerity to state his qualifications.

Again, we gotta grow up. Yehuda's contributions to Rails 3 _were_ important.
What's wrong with taking credit for that? I'm often critical of the Rails
community for an excess of ego, but this is not one of those cases.

It seems pretty clear that the idea of an open source developer asking for
money seems vaguely filthy to a bunch of people. I think this is unhealthy and
poisonous. It condemns open source to be the provence of academics, the
unemployed, those able to snatch free time away from their friends and
familier, or those working at the largess of their corporate employers. That's
a shitty limit on the scope of free software.

------
moe
As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to
understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it.

Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands,
depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different
story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for
newbies.

The hard part is installing the exact _same_ Rails on multiple Macs and
deploying the exact _same_ Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And
when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far
beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service
startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in
your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and
safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services.
There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them.

In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be _harmful_ , just like the still virulent
code-generator brain-rot in rails itself.

I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches
ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-
platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows
Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that.

 _If_ you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a
single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything.

For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed
more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a
kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...

~~~
sanderjd
As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here
are completely different. Your problem _definitely_ exists, and lots of people
are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving
chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management
systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing
solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less
interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other
unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the
many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects
that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong.

Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would
be worthwhile to make it easier.

~~~
moe
_and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier_

Seriously?

1\. Install XCode and homebrew

2\. sudo brew install {postgresql,rbenv,ruby-build}

3\. Close terminal. Open terminal.

4\. mkdir proj && cd proj && rbenv install 1.9.2-p290 && rbenv local
1.9.2-p290

5\. gem install rails && rbenv rehash

6\. rails new foo

Honestly, we can argue if this was 5 steps or 8. We can also argue if 'rbenv
rehash' should be necessary (I'm not even sure it really is, wrote that down
from top of my head).

But if someone fails on these instructions that fit on a Post-It™ then they
should overthink their ambitions towards a programming career.

And if they run into bugs during that procedure then these bugs must be fixed.
Because this is (and should be) the canonical way to install a vanilla Rails
on OSX.

~~~
sanderjd
Dude, take a step back and forget that you know this stuff already and do it
professionally. That list is not easy and far from obvious, even for real
programmers coming from other environments, let alone for actual programming
beginners.

Your list is far from canonical even at this very moment and hasn't even been
_common_ for very long. To figure out your list, I have to:

1) know that homebrew is the "right" way to install software that rails
depends on, rather than MacPorts or Fink, or the Mac app store, or
download.com, and oh yeah, there is this thing called sudo, and I should
install homebrew recipes using it, or should I??,

2) know that rbenv and ruby-build are things that exist and that they are
competitors to RVM but are either more or less in vogue depending on who I
talk to,

3) understand that rbenv doesn't just work in the current shell without
closing and re-opening it,

4) know that the "right" version of ruby to use is 1.9.2-p290 (I have to know
the patch-number?!) and that I need to install it and set it as my local
version (wait, what does that mean, why do I need a local version?),

before I can get around to actually installing rails and using it.

Now, I could just blindly follow someone's list from a blog post (randomly
chosen presumably, because the theory here is that I don't know enough about
these things to make an informed decision). Maybe I would even get lucky and
find a list that works properly with the version of rails that the official
documentation is talking about, but it would _still_ be a much better
experience by far to go to the official rails site and be told: "hey, download
this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image straight from
us!".

~~~
moe
_To figure out your list, I have to_

No. You have to know none of that. You just have to copy/paste the steps from
the rails-homepage (where they should be prominently listed, the lack thereof
is the real bug).

 _"hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image
straight from us!"_

Wait, how is that different from above?

Yes, you may be done 2 minutes faster. But you just deprived yourself of at
least getting a glimpse on which parts are involved, even if you don't
understand them yet. That means you're now even more hopeless when stuff
breaks later (and stuff always breaks later).

And as a fun fact: Any sane bootstrapper would use _the exact same script_
behind the scenes anyway. There simply is no other way unless you plan to re-
invent homebrew and rbenv along the way.

I'm really troubled to understand who we're trying to care for here. It sounds
like you want to make this Really Easy for absolute beginners who can barely
setup a printer.

That is a noble goal (for a printer driver), but if you want to teach someone
programming then there's a point where you have to stop dumbing it down
artificially. And that point is as early as possible.

The worst you can do to a newbie is to put him into an opaque sandbox with
different behaviors and errors from what the "big guys" are using.

~~~
mgkimsal
1\. Install XCode and homebrew

2\. sudo brew install {postgresql,rbenv,ruby-build}

3\. Close terminal. Open terminal.

4\. mkdir proj && cd proj && rbenv install 1.9.2-p290 && rbenv local
1.9.2-p290

5\. gem install rails && rbenv rehash

6\. rails new foo

\-------------------

"hey, download this all-inclusive, up-to-date, guaranteed to work disk image
straight from us!"

Wait, how is that different from above?

\-------------------

 _Really_? You _really_ have to ask how those two processes are different?

"stop dumbing it down artificially"

If (sometimes competing) complexities weren't continually added, there
wouldn't be a need to 'dumb it down'.

"(and stuff always breaks later)"

Wow. Most other web framework communities don't have _that_ much problems with
'stuff always breaking later'. Maybe Rails has reached a tipping point?

"There simply is no other way unless you plan to re-invent homebrew and rbenv
along the way."

Or until someone else _does_ 'reinvent' one of those, and all the cool kids
start using it, leaving everyone who learned the 'legacy' way out in the cold
without an upgrade path beyond "start over".

 _with different behaviors and errors from what the "big guys" are using_

I think part of the purpose of the kickstarter project is having one of the
'big guys' behind it. Supposedly that would mean at least one (or more) of the
'big guys' would indeed be using the same process as the 'newbs', reducing
this chasm.

Sounds like you're threatened some by this - it was hard for you, therefore it
should always be hard for everyone for now and forever.

~~~
moe
_Sounds like you're threatened some by this - it was hard for you, therefore
it should always be hard for everyone for now and forever._

Yes, I'm threatened by this. But not in the way you think, because as shown
above, it's not really hard. It's _5 lines_. What's wrong with kids these
days?

I'm threatened because I'm the guy who comes in to clean up after "junior
programmers" who couldn't even be bothered to learn 5 lines to install their
dev-environment and who consequently also don't have the slightest clue about
basic realities such as "diskspace is finite" or "No, /Users/Bob/rails/tmp is
not a valid path in production".

At least give the kids a chance to learn. Don't lure them with shortcuts that
result in unsustainable habits that cause great frustration in the long run.
Unlearning is harder than learning.

Rails with its false sense of simplicity is breeding plenty diletantes already
as it is. We need _less_ of that, not more.

~~~
ddagradi
It's not "5 lines", and it's not about "junior programmers". My designers need
to work with my Rails apps, and learning the intricacies of setting up a Rails
stack is not their job description. Just like maintaining their dev
environment isn't mine. There's a bigger issue here than "those kids will
never learn things the hard way".

~~~
moe
_It's not "5 lines"_

Would you mind scrolling up to my original comment where I posted the exact 5
lines?

 _My designers need to work with my Rails apps_

Then you should have noticed that installing rails is the least of your
worries. Database seeds, missing dependencies, test-users, broken fixtures,
broken mocks, missing external APIs, version control conflicts, gem screw-ups,
failing migrations, _rails upgrades_ , _differences to the production setup_.
Those are the daily timesinks over here in the real world.

The initial rails installation doesn't even register in the grand scheme of
things.

~~~
sanderjd
I can't tell what you're actually arguing for or against in this thread. There
seem to be two different things:

1) The rails.app project wants to solve a problem that doesn't exist. There
are a lot of comments here from other people who think getting started with
rails is confusing, and who point out that your much-touted five steps are not
complete, canonical, or easy, so I won't further beat that dead horse.

2) There are many harder problems you'll come across when doing rails
professionally. This is incredibly true, nobody disagrees, but it's irrelevant
to the rails.app project.

------
joshaidan
I propose a different funding model for this project. Why not approach Rails
hosting vendors like Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. to fund this project, in
exchange for built-in one-click deployment to their hosting environment.

Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.

~~~
spicyj
Presumably they can consider the $10k sponsorship option if they want
something like that.

~~~
joshaidan
Yeah, it could also be an ongoing funding partnership. My impression would be
that this is something that Heroku et al would be very interested in
supporting, and even developing themselves.

------
driverdan
If there's someone I'd trust to do a project like this through Kickstarter
it's Yehuda. And since his time isn't cheap I understand the $25,000 price
tag.

To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like
most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team
started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the
same, possibly taking a little longer?

------
tptacek
I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails
dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting
Rails running.

Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has
been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

~~~
ajacksified
As a fairly recent OSX and a fairly recent Rails user, I had no trouble
learning either.

That is, except for Lion and XCode 4.2/4.3, which caused me about three lost
days. 'rvm get head' and 'rvm install 1.9.3-head' fixed that, though.

~~~
ericd
I would say that that three lost days getting set up is a large, large problem
for Rails, though.

~~~
ajacksified
Oh, absolutely - but don't confuse a Rails problem with a Ruby problem. It
wasn't Rails causing problems, it was Ruby itself.

~~~
ericd
If I'm getting set up, I really don't distinguish between Rails itself being
irritating and one of its dependencies being a PITA. Those dependencies are
part of the architecture of Rails, so it gets the blame. It's not like I need
foo version of ruby if I'm just doing some quick scripting.

------
jwarzech
I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to
mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work
on it?)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
He's taking time off of work to do this:

<https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056>

~~~
jwarzech
Well I guess I should have just asked him :) At least he didn't agree to your
other assumptions as to how the money will be used.

------
foobar2k
3 step process:

Step 1: Download the "Command line tools for Xcode" here

<https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action>

Step 2: Install homebrew with this command

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(/usr/bin/curl -fksSL
[https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contribu...](https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contributions/install_homebrew.rb\))

Step 3: gem install rails

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
Yah, rather then funding a project to make Rails easier to install on OSX
(because it's not with the plethora information guides and bootstrap scripts),
why not tackle real problems like concurrency and websockets in Rails.

~~~
VeejayRampay
While I understand the frustration, wycats, like any other open source
developer gets to pick his battles.

Lowering the Rails entry bar is a good thing, making things simpler is a sign
of maturity for a product. To address your bit about concurrency and
websockets in Rails, people are working on the issue, see the talks given by
Ilya Grigorik for example, concurrency will be coming to Rails at some point.
And so will the integration with client-side framworks like Backbone or Ember.
It just takes time.

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
Agreed, but isn't this a good cause to fund to expatiate development.

A year or two back if you ask, "how do I built my bleeding edge web
application" the answer normally was 'use Rails'. My point is the Rails has
been sorely lagging behind other invitations.

This just feels like a waste otherwise.

------
egypturnash
oh god yes please I am a rails n00b who tried fooling with Rails a couple
weeks ago and found the installation process INTENSELY FRUSTRATING. Especially
compared to the unthinking ease of MAMP.

Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications
(and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control
panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system
without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal
as much as possible.

 _pledges ten bucks_

~~~
larrywright
"Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible"

I don't mean to sound condescending, but if you're interested in using Rails
(or any similar web platform), you need to be comfortable with the command
line. It's not hard to learn, and there's even a good Peepcode video called
"Meet the Command Line" that serves as a gentle introduction.

If you're really adamant about staying away from the terminal, you should look
elsewhere.

------
icebraining

        PLEDGE $100 OR MORE
    
        The previous rewards, plus access to the internal list for the project,
        where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this.
    

This feels awkward. Paying for this seems very much unlike the OSS model. Not
that I'm complaining, but it threw me off a bit.

------
apurvamehta
I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady
(<https://github.com/joshfng/railsready>) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu
boxes and it has never been more than one click.

~~~
VeejayRampay
To be fair, he said he didn't necessarily want to duplicate the effort of
others. I'm sure he will garner any information he can from those projects to
help make that app awesome.

------
ovi256
As Rails founding fathers complained of Java frameworks bloat, today's micro-
framework fans complain of Rails bloat. Quite a cycle we've come through,
isn't it ?

~~~
tptacek
He's not complaining about bloat. Unlike many other high-level languages, Ruby
has several viable execution environments (MRI 1.8, MRI 1.9, Rubinius, and
JRuby) and Rails works on all of them. OS X ships with a system Ruby. The
result seems to be that some people have trouble getting the right combination
of runtime and libraries running.

~~~
ovi256
And that's my point, Rails has a lot of functionality that it provides through
a lot of dependencies.

Exactly the opposite of the self-contained mini-framework (if not micro-) it
started as.

~~~
chc
I don't think it's fair to characterize Rails' early accusations against Java
webdev as "The frameworks are too large." They accused Java frameworks of
requiring too much ceremony, repetition and verbosity, but I can't think of
many instances where early Rails advocates attacked Java for having too many
features.

------
uptown
If someone won't make the effort to learn how to get an environment up and
running, what makes him think that environment will have any real user once
it's ready? There's a certain value of the commitment one takes when they
decide to push forward and figure things out necessary to proceed.

------
ignorethat
I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it
died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was.

And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's
that:

1\. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that
confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language,
which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the
fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog
doesn't work.

2\. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are _not_ new as they once were, so
since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they
are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they
are doing.

But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take
bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset
pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk
3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the
additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and
original intent of Rails.

Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that
makes both development _and_ scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails
years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent.
Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much
harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop
quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure
way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it
shouldn't fail like this.

------
gauravk92
Setting up a vagrant script would be worth more. Portable development
environment (Ubuntu running in a virtual box), cross platform support, easily
configurable and duplicatable, and segregated from host machine.

You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't
deal with that, use vagrant.

P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that
with whatever he's going to do.

------
tigris
I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install
rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production
environment.

~~~
mgkimsal
Seemingly everyone just does

git push to heroku

and that's been heralded as the best thing ever, so people don't have to futz
with all the server setup/management.

But with regards to people looking for similar ease of use on the desktop for
local development, they're all blithering idiots who shouldn't be allowed to
touch a computer because they don't understand the intricacies of rvm vs
rbenv.

There seems a bit of a disconnect here. Most people are proud of all the hard-
won knowledge (sometimes through months or years of experience), and feel that
everyone else should have to go through similar hell to attain some magic
level of guru-ness. But... don't take away my heroku account!

------
billsix
So did DHH give permission to use the Rails logo for this project?????

"The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a
trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the
promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been
involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case,
you're on the way to lose your trademark. So I only grant promotional use for
products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the
development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution."

[http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-
no-t...](http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-to-use-of-
rails-logo-567.html)

------
ryan-allen
I think crowd sourcing is a great idea. Being a professional programmer
doesn't mean doing it for 120 hours a week. I'm more than happy to throw a
little bit of money at something like this to have a good job be done of it.

Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and
the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which
takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame.

I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open
source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25
to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is:

* I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself. * It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves. * Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from.

This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to
focus on this and I can't wait for the result.

------
eblume
I decided to learn Rails this week, and just went through the process of
following <http://railstutorial.com> (actually I'm about half through it.)

The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two,
and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow,
following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby.

I, for one, do not see the need for this.

------
DamnYuppie
Having been a Rails developer I don't have much trouble getting Rails up and
going on a system. However I do have several friends who seem to have no end
of trouble getting theirs setup working reliably. Given they are not full time
developers, but they complain about how hard it is to get everything
configured so I can see how useful something like this can be for many people
looking to try out Rails.

~~~
varikin
I agree. I have been thinking about a shell script to setup a Django dev
environment for my coworkers when needed, mainly the frontend developer
because they are not familiar with or have many of the tools I take for
granted. This idea is rather brilliant. It would be nice the app could open or
setup a sublime text or textmate project for an app as well.

------
methoddk
Installing Rails on OSX is trivial. If one really needs this process
streamlined, maybe you shouldn't be coding? Or maybe you should just stop
using a computer?

Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front
page that has no business here.

I thought this was _hacker_ news. Seems more like "check out my super cool
project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(

------
benatkin
It has a link to Yehuda's profile in the sidebar, where it shows that he's
funded two KickStarter projects. One of them is this:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-
github-c...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-
client-for-mac-os-x/comments)

Why shouldn't this turn out the same way? The person who started the HubCap
project is a prolific open source contributor. I'm glad he didn't drop
everything else to work on HubCap, as he made many great contributions to API
client development last year.

I hope Yehuda changes his mind about this sooner rather than later. I really
like seeing what Yehuda comes up with and this doesn't interest me at all. I
use the command line, and I recommend homebrew to anyone on OS X who's serious
about learning ruby, and so far it hasn't failed me. I've seen the Google App
Engine launcher and I think it's pretty good but I still prefer the command-
line tools.

------
ramblerman
Im all for opening doors to newbies, and I think udacity and coursera are
leading the way in that regard.

But if people desire to become programmers is it really that bad to have them
come in contact with a little bit of configuration and head scratching.

------
ashconnor
I used this guide: [http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-
ruby...](http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby-mac)
when getting started, which was pretty painless.

There's also a GUI for RVM called Jewelry Box which makes handling gem sets
and ruby versions easy: <http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox>

I think the money would be better spent on creating a comprehensive beginners
guide since the 4th edition of Agile Web Development with Rails is lacking.

------
dustinrodrigues
I think that installing and configuring a database like Postgres or MySQL
would be useful since it's often a non-trivial step in getting a production
app ready (e.g. for Heroku).

------
shapeshed
OSS development has to be funded somewhere and to date it has been the
benevolence of bigger organisations that have awarded grants or developer
time. This gives the opportunity for a developer to offer to solve a problem
and for the community to vote with their pockets. It empowers developers and
the community to get behind a problem space and if people don't want it it
won't happen.

------
headius
JRuby will be in GSoC, and may also have a separate "summer of code" via an
as-yet-unnamed benefactor. Perhaps we should just get Yehuda to mentor a
student to build a single "Rails.app" that runs on _all_ platforms, rather
than just OS X?

<http://jruby.org/gsoc>

------
fieldforceapp
How would this compare to say the BitNami RubyStack:

<http://bitnami.org>

------
lukeholder
Seems like this is connected to rails 4 release: sidebar: "and your input will
guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced
developers."

~~~
wycats
The main link to Rails 4 is that we've announced that Rails 4 will drop Ruby
1.8.7 support, which means that some sort of install will be mandatory on OSX
beginning with Rails 4.

~~~
lukeholder
also, I would LOVE to contribute to the GUI design. Let me know... lukemh -at-
gmail

------
wh-uws
What about on a virtual private server like at linode? Then one doesn't
necessarily have to shell out for a Mac to run osx.

I would be much more interested in that.

~~~
RegEx
If you're interested, I have a rails template with extensive documentation on
setting it up on a server from scratch.

<https://github.com/Hack56/Rails-Template/wiki>

~~~
wh-uws
Thanks alot im getting ready to redo an old wordpress multiuser site in rails
and I was having trouble learning how to configure it

------
wildster
£25,000, how long would it take set up a repo so you could do go: sudo apt-get
install rails-3.2 on Ubuntu/Debian?

~~~
bratsche
Ubuntu has a rails package already, and nobody uses it. It only serves to
confuse new users. Trying to mix deb and gem just hasn't worked well so far.

Making a Rails.app for Mac is different though, because everything would be
isolated in your .app, while a .deb would install the files to the system and
track them in the package management database, so trying to modify them
outside of apt-get/dpkg just b0rks everything.

------
jasonlotito
As it wasn't mentioned, anyone have any idea of the license he'll be releasing
this under?

------
rmc
This would be brilliant way to fund new open source work. ☺

------
tferris
I don't know. There are many good observations about what happened to Rails
the last years in the comments. Rails is complicated and to get fluent in
Rails takes some time. But this complexity came with a great flexibility. And
that's a sign that we are facing a phenomenal ecosystem. I admit starting
rails is frustrating, so many new concepts but everything like rvm has a
reason why and even beginners will realize this quickly.

Yehuda's approach reminds me of the early days of webdevelopment where you
could install a WAMP stack with one click on your windows systems. I never
liked those one-click-installers—you don't know what happens to your system
and deinstalling was a nightmare with still running db servers somewhere for
years.

You can't wipe away Rails complicated entry with such an one click-installer.
After you installed Rails with one click things aren't getting easier your
still have to figure out next steps and which frameworks to choose (i.e. ERB
or HAML, SCSS or LESS, MySQL or Postgre, etc.). Or something breaks within
rvm: with an yehuda's approach you are completely clueless because you don't
know anything about rvm, gemsets because the installer did all the work for
you.

Sometimes there is even too much magic in Rails. I am still wondering if
ActiveRecord is too much abstraction and if there are better more direct ORMs
like DataMapper, I am used to ActiveRecord but still I can not fluently create
data models, there's always something I forget, using the plural or singular,
saving the updated migration, rolling back the migration, etc. Otherwise it's
far beyond any ORM from other Frameworks I have ever seen in terms of speed.
And its usage in Ruby is very consistent. Also Rails shell commands are very
consistent, once you understand the rails syntax (like rails generate or
destroy something you can quickly build anything in minutes), I tried several
times to find something similar with python/django but there the entries
seemed to me even more complicated, don't follow any system and felt
restricted, i.e. Django's automatic Backend (no offense, i know not enough
about django and python to say anything serious but that was just my first
impression).

Another last great example of Rails: once you managed to install Rails, just
put haml, less, less-bootstrap-rails and simple_form in your gemfile and run
bundle. with this setup you can build web apps in minutes with perfect design
and they are fully customizable. some years ago you needed hours or days to
get to similar results. It takes time to get there but once you are there you
have the power.

this pace and variety in the rails ecosystem comes from so many talented
people who contribute. trying to set one standard for how things are done
would slow down this pace.

finally, I think that Yehuda doesn't want to raise money, he just wants to get
attention and the approval that he had the right idea.

------
iamgilesbowkett
I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here:

<http://xkcd.com/927/>

The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out
that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try
to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks
you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it
in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane
defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only
response I got was 'fuck you.'

If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you
better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something
other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind
of interaction, he's not getting my money.

Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be
honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't
getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some
amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it
instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-)

Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with
Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before.

(If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas
from.)

Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and
comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way,
WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several
projects of this nature. For instance:

<https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop>

<http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack>

<https://github.com/joshfng/railsready>

So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a
new standard!

I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read
<http://railstutorial.com/>

But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter:

[http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472...](http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/185134250050334720)

Step 1: make Rails hard

Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy

Step 3: PROFIT

~~~
jtchang
Do you mind going into some details about why the Bundler gem was mocking you?
I'm a Python dev and only know rudimentary rails/ruby.

~~~
bradly
In your Gemfile Bundler requires you to tell it where to lookup for gems. For
99.99% of people that is going to be rubygems.org, but it doesn't have to be.
There has been talk about making this the default and then allowing someone to
turn it off.

edit: The RubyRouges podcast has a great episode with the maintainer of
Bundler where a lot of the difficulties with Bundler are discussed in depth.
That's the "talk" I was referring too.

~~~
iamgilesbowkett
well, this is what's insane about Rails these days. we have a value which is
correct in 99.99% of the cases, and we are (at best) debating whether or not
to make it the default.

I say at best because obviously in my case I did not see a whole lot of
debate. the GitHub issue for it is likewise extremely not-discussion-y.
wherever the discussion for this incredibly controversial idea is taking
place, I haven't seen it.

------
scottshea
Slightly ironic since I just got a MacBook for my new job and am trying to get
it set up for Rails development.

~~~
Smudge
ironic... or, just coincidental?

 _i‧ro‧ny - Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually
occurs._

 _co‧in‧ci‧dence - A sequence of events that, although accidental, seems to
have been planned or arranged._

