Pablo Fernandez

Recently I reported a bug for Formtastic. Justin French, the author of Formtastic, created a branch and made a fix. He then asked me for my feedback.

I look at the code and then decided to give it a try. In a pre-Bundler world that would have required this:

1. Find a directory to play with this.
2. Clone the Formtastic repository with Git from http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic.git
3. Create a local branch tracking the remote branch with the fix, GH-264. This is something I don’t do often enough with Git and every time I have to look it up.
4. Figure out how to build a gem out of it. Is it rake? is it rake build? is it rake gem? This might also fail and need fixing some stuff.
5. Install said gem, which is not that trivial. Should I install as my user or as root? Should I remove the currently installed version of the gem? If the branch didn’t have an increase in version number it could be problematic.
6. Test my application. Make sure it’s picking up the new gem.
7. Uninstall the gem, maybe re-install the stock gem.
8. Delete the temporary directories I’ve created to hold the cloned repository (this is something I always forget to do and a month later I’m wondering: what’s this? is there any important changes I’ve did in this repo?).

The tasks are not that big, but are very inconvenient to do and uncomfortable for a perfectionist like me. Thankfully I’m using Bundler, so the above was like this:

1. Add :git => "http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic.git", :branch => "GH-264" to the Formtastic line in Gemfile.
2. Run bundle install.
3. Test app.
4. Revert the Gemfile change.
5. Run bundle install.

I really love Bundler.