Defect #24924
closed
Redmine installation produces different results depending on the date installed
Added by Angelo Bertolli over 7 years ago.
Updated over 7 years ago.
Description
The general problem¶
Redmine releases leave their dependencies open-ended, and assume that later versions of gems will always be backward compatible and can be installed with the release.
If you install Redmine on a system using the instructions on the site, you will get a different result depending on what version of a gem happens to be available at that time.
A side effect, specific example of this being an issue¶
When the Gemfile specifies a version like '>= x.x.x' it will throw an error during installation if the newest version of a gem has changed dependencies.
e.g.
- When Redmine 3.3.1 was released it could be installed on RHEL 7 using Ruby 2.0
- At some point in time, nokogiri 1.7 was released that requires Ruby 2.1
- When attempting to run bundler to install Redmine on an identical system after this point will generate an error requiring Ruby 2.1
Solution¶
The current/correct practice for maintaining a Gemfile should be to use '~> x.x.x' whenever possible. This ensures both that (1) the version of the gem that was verified with a particular release is used, and (2) future gem versions do not cause unresolved dependency problems.
This issue affects more than one version, but should be fixed only for future versions.
- Status changed from New to Closed
- Resolution set to Wont fix
Angelo Bertolli wrote:
- At some point in time, nokogiri 1.7 was released that requires Ruby 2.1
r16169 fixed it.
And we have CI server.
http://www.redmine.org/builds/index.html
Gemfile should be to use '~> x.x.x'
It is too hard to follow new version release.
I see the example of nokogiri is changed.
Friendly suggestion:
You can use your CI server for normal development, but when you're ready to make a release, your workflow could be to update the Gemfile for that release to specify the snapshot of the condition that Redmine was tested for the release at that time.
The problem of gems updating is well-known, and if configuration management is not handled properly, you will continue to have endless questions (not only on this site but elsewhere) for help when the installation doesn't work out of the box.
Just something to consider.
What gem do you suggest use '~> x.x.x'?
Our gem policy is using fixed Rails version because Rails minor release broke Redmine many times.
The reason of 'gem "nokogiri", ">= 1.6.7.2"' is security advisories (r15096).
You are right, this isn't really a bug that will correspond to a code fix, but rather a possible process improvement.
My thought is whatever is in trunk/branch can stay with '>=' but when when you produce a release, e.g. tag and zip: that one can be converted to '~>' using the version that works with your CI server, because it is the configuration that was tested at the time of release.
I see things like builder, rails-html-sanitizer, rmagick, etc. in trunk that may break future deployments of a given version of Redmine.
I apologize--I'm not knowledgeable enough about Ruby development to fully understand the implications of Rails dependencies with regards to gems and Redmine. Thanks for taking the time to look into this.
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Updated by Toshi MARUYAMA