Interesting
- BitBucket now has Git support. Unlimited private repos for free.
- If you’re using RVM in a shell script, it’s a good idea to call it with
sh -c. RVM does weird things to your shell, and we’ve seen it exit the calling process unexpectedly. Do something like sh -c "rvm exec gem install chef" to safely use RVM. - Kris mentioned that when writing complex migrations, you should consider testing them. You can write a test that asserts on the state of the DB before and after the migration runs up and down. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
- Firefox 9 will have support for the CSS font-stretch property. Finally! See this bug report from 1999.
Help!
- We were seeing one to two seconds of clock drift every twenty seconds on a VM running Ubuntu. If you start seeing this on your VMs, do not use ntpdate to fix it. Install the guest additions from your VM software. It’ll set up the clock to sync with the physical clock on the host machine. Much nicer!
I don’t see a lot of value to writing tests for migrations. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t test them.
I normally find it easier and faster to just test them manually with some different sets of data.
Automated tests make sense for functionality that you want to ensure doesn’t change as the rest of the system changes around it.
Migrations (should) never change, nor should they utilize any models or functions that could change. So, in my mind, there’s no benefit from continuing to run tests for them once you have them working.
Now, if you find writing an automated test faster, easier, or better than manually testing a migration, then it of course makes sense. But I’ve never found writing automated tests for migrations to be any of those things.
October 7, 2011 at 12:59 am
Joseph, I neglected to mention that Kris was suggesting unit test the migration, and then throwing away the test. Sounds like you’re both on the same page.
October 7, 2011 at 9:36 am