Thursday, April 3, 2008

Why Git won't mean Rails snubs Windows

Posted by David

There seem to be some confusion over what the core development of Rails on Git will mean to Windows users. The simple answer is: Absolutely nothing. But let me give you a slightly more involved answer:

  • rake rails:freeze:edge will still work. We’ll make it use either zip or tar.gz files. It’ll actually be even better as it won’t even require a SCM to work.
  • Tickets will still accept regular patches that you can create with any diff tool.

So this will mean no difference to users of Rails and it’ll mean no difference to developers of Rails. What it will mean is that people who are interested in using Git (which again does come in a variety of flavors for Windows despite not being as well-supported as on nix) will get some value-added features in form of easier branching and the other Git goodies.

If you’re freaking out, calm down. Rails and the developers behind it have snubbed Windows far, far worse in the past :). The original release of the framework didn’t even run on Windows. This move to Git is not a snub.