Redmine

Merci, Jean-Philippe, you've nailed it. I upgraded that plugin (a custom one developed for our forum by a friend), and now everything is progressing.

For reference, the history of every step I ended up taking, and a full log of the stuff flying by on the terminal screen. It's not so important, but illustrates how people like me stumble around in the dark at times. Keep in mind that almost nothing of that output makes sense to me (even though I'm totally familiar with Debian). As you can see in here, some issues take several steps to resolve - again, without having a clue what "nokogiri" is, for example:

svn update
    git pull
    rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
    bundle update
    gem list
    ls -a ~
    vi /root/.gem/specs/rubygems.org%80/latest_specs.4.8 
    git branch
    ls
    ls -ltr
    vi README.rdoc 
    git log
    ls -l
    rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
    ls plugins/*/gem*
    ls plugins/*/Gem*
    vi plugins/jl_question/Gemfile 
    rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
    bundle install
    bundle update
    gem install nokogiri -v '1.5.6
    gem install nokogiri -v '1.5.6'
    apt-get install libxslt-ruby
    gem install nokogiri -v '1.5.6'
    apt-get install libxslt1-dev
    gem install nokogiri -v '1.5.6'
    bundle update
    rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
    rake tmp:cache:clear
    rake tmp:sessions:clear
    /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Feel free to close this issue, although I do hope it does plant some seeds for future docs. And thank you for the spot-on help.

-jcw

Ian Little: the idea was once proposed of having official plugins, but it just takes too much effort for a small team. The fundamentals of redmine plugins evolved a bit from 1.x to 2.x but that shouldn't break on every minor release. Which it does, in reality, for various reasons, some very surprising. The very problem of the whole redmine plugins ecosystem is that most of them are not tested at all. In most cases we wouldn't even know how to automatically test that they don't fall in a 500 error with the next upgrade, but that's hard to automate if the plugin author didn't write some basic tests. I'd have some ideas to improve that but for now I stick with my own plugins only cause it bit me in the past, same as you.

@Derric: wow, that's a criticism. The wiki is open to everyone with a redmine account basically, so if you have precise idea on what to do on some pages, go! If it's more of a general trend, feel free to open an issue with your analysis on the subject ; maybe we just need a "ruby concepts for non-rubyists" page, as Opscode did with their "ruby for non-rubyists" in the Chef wiki. Assign the issue directly to me, I'd be happy to think about it with you and spend some time to fix things that need to be fixed. I find the few "official" docs (the ones maintained by the team, like RedmineInstall, Rest_api, ..) quite correct. As a sysadmin I find them linear enough with the required details to check prerequisites. But any precise/constructive criticism is welcome! I strongly encourage you to open a new issue with your thoughts.

@Jean-Claude: as this issue is solved I close the issue, thanks for the feedback!