Site updates 0.32

Created , updated

Look at commit 42e0f26 for evidence of a breach of discipline on my part. Out of habit, I was working directly on the master branch when news of a security vulnerability in the Mail gem used by Rails persuaded me to do a hasty deployment, even though I suspected that in my app the vulnerability in the gem was unlikely to be exploitable.

The breach of discipline referred to above was that I was working on the master branch when I should have been on a topic branch. I had a bunch of commits already pushed out, but the feature was not yet completed, so I couldn’t use the tip of the master branch for deployment purposes.

Now I could have created another branch containing only the fix (eg. "security") and then deployed that, but I didn’t really want to create another branch in the repo that I would then be obliged to keep around forever.

So I created a new branch for my topic (that’s the "unobtrusive" branch mentioned in the commit message for 42e0f26) and then rewound the master branch and applied the security fix. This required a forced update when pushing, something which I only allowed myself to do because I am the sole consumer of this particular repo.

Once all this was done, I was free to merge the changes on the master branch into the "unobtrusive" topic branch (although I could have just rebased too, and perhaps I should have in order to hide this little slip up on my part). Finally when the topic was finished I could just merge the "unobtrusive" topic branch back into "master" and delete the former.

Lessons learned?

  • be more disciplined about using topic branches when starting on features or refactorings that will take many commits to complete
  • consider reviving the old "maint" branch that I used to use and keeping it around for these cases where you need to deploy a one-commit fix right now

It’s funny. I stopped using the "maint" branch a while back because I thought it was a mistake (see my blog post, "Thoughts on staging environments and branches for web apps").

Now I’m thinking that I wasn’t quite right there; while it’s true that equating "master" with "staging" and "maint" with "production" is a mistake, I think this little episode clearly demonstrates the utility of having a "maint" branch which closely tracks the "master" branch, usually lagging a little behind (at the previously deployed commit) so that you can easily push out quick fixes when required. Keeping this kind of branch is dead easy in Git, seeing as it will basically always be fast-forwarded.

42e0f26 Merge branch 'master' into unobtrusive
04e90cb Update to Steak 1.0.1
950d776 Update database_cleaner to 0.6.1
dc399b6 Update to Capybara 0.4.1.1
97ce4fa Remove unnecessary require
a1f119a deploy: bump Bundler version requirement to 1.0.9
44f91e3 Update to jQuery 1.5
840b85b Be more radical about avoiding HTML layout around non-HTML requests
3e879aa Inline template_exists? method in JsController
88d0e41 Drop unnecessary call to [/tags/scoped #scoped]
df7b8cb Drop unnecessary parens
d7df7bb Remove last use of #sort_options method
3803ccf Remove #sort_options and #default_sort_options (now unused)
c99119e Rename #arel_sort_options and #default_arel_sort_options
e49fa5c Replace ternary with more concise && operator
a5db146 Fix indenting
d29cfdd Edit lib/sortable for brevity
bba9ccd Remove unnecessary temporary variable
5aaf171 Avoid repeated calls to [/tags/map #map] in lib/sortable
d18370b Fix breakage in lib/sortable when no sort param present
191c0b3 Use define_method rather than class_eval in lib/sortable
a79fc60 Make controller instance methods added by lib/sortable private
bbf719a Temporarily revert 840b85b (layout suppression for non-HTML requests)
089b4b2 Unobtrusive topic deletion with graceful degradation
8f1379f Make #button_to_destroy_model degrade gracefully
c3a142c Drop explicit call to polymorphic_path
71ed189 Implement graceful degredation for comment destruction
5de7f2b Remove superfluous button_to_destroy_{issue,topic,comment} helpers
447410a Remove button_to_destroy_page helper
df6aa2a Update stale routing spec to reflect newly added routes
96f7a3a Add unobtrusive AJAX-y post deletion in admin/posts
6240c6f Replace longhand button_to call with shortcut helper call
810a20d Remove non-functional tag destroy button
3158b47 Use button_to_destroy_model helper in issue awaiting moderation template
98ecfdd Add 'ham' button to issue awaiting moderation template
8ad41e4 Use button_to_destroy_model helper in issues#show
31b727a Implement link deletion
11896cb Add destroy button to links#edit
fd01aac Use #button_to_destroy_model in repos#edit
00f9340 Use #button_to_destroy_model in snippets#edit
ac9cf6f Comment out non-functional tag delete button in tags#edit
c82c3c6 Use #button_to_destroy_model in tweets#edit
abb624e Mark a tags#edit view spec as pending
bbe76bd deploy: insist on having Bundler 1.0.10 on the server