On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 06:39:34AM -0700, Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas wrote: > > This makes it very hard to get new contributors to Rails core since it > seems every railer is busy and chances are small that they have enough > time to figure out the Rails internals by themselves so that they can > contribute small changes. There are a lot of plugin contributions > since its documentation is well written. I think there could be more > contributors if we had a README.internals that explained the whole > idea about how Rails is structured and the reasons behind it. Then, > each major update to Rails internal structure could be reflected in > this document...
Same problem here, but ... There are articles about the internals around the net. Unfortunately they quickly get outdated. And in a way, this is a good thing, because it means Rails is continuously evolving. With all the changes going in to 3.0, maintaining such documentation may be a nightmare, unless it becomes version specific. Especially with all the refactoring going on. Here are a few tips I found useful: 1) logging - insert logging everywhere you can when solving a problem. With very concise code this helps understand what is going on and when faster than any documentation. 2) reading changelogs - sometimes unrelated stuff can give insight into the peculiar cases that Rails has to handle. 3) debugger - stopping and looking at the backtrack can teach a lot about the architecture. 4) Lighthouse - like reading changelogs, but with more details 5) browsing through the source when you don't need to - when you are less frustrated and you don't need to urgently find out what's wrong. Especially the last part - hack on ruby when you are not under pressure. Do it for fun. Learn things before you need them. Read articles about ROR when you have spare time. It pays off eventually. Even if this would mean investing more time in total, it will be more pleasurable. > > I was just trying to add a :full_message parameter to validations, so > that I could prepare a patch to LightHouse, but was stuck trying to > figure out how ActiveRecord is loaded, how Validations are included in > ActiveRecord without being required (when I discovered they are > autoloaded), what are the differences between ActiveModel and > ActiveRecord and several other doubts. It would be much easier if such > a README.internals document exists. I spent about 2 hours doing really > nothing useful to Rails itself, while I could use this time to > actually write a useful patch... I know what it is like to wake up after a few hours of hacking knowing you basically did ... nothing really. > I would like to know what is the Rails core team opinion about that. Beware - my opinion is just from a user struggling to understand Rails, not anyone from the core team. Cheers -- Cezary Bagiński --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
