Redmine

I'm not sure if we should entirely halt the boot or we should just throw some warnings in the console.

Marius BALTEANU wrote in #note-2:

I'm not sure if we should entirely halt the boot or we should just throw some warnings in the console.

Let me put it in another way: why should we let Redmine boot into a (production) state that we know upfront, sooner or later will result in errors and/or potential data corruption? Am I missing something? Is there some use-case?

FWIW: I do agree that if we were to let Redmine halt the boot process, we should also provide a clear and meaningful error message to the user.

Outright refusing to start entirely with pending migrations may be a bad idea as it may prevent people from running rake tasks which require the environment to load or even just to start a rails console to fix issues with a pending/failed migration.

Instead, if this is in fact desired, we could set config.active_record.migration_error = :page_load in the production environment (it's enabled by default in development). This will insert the ActiveRecord::Migration::CheckPending rack middleware which will raise a (handled) error if there are any pending migrations when loading a page. Maybe we could even make that configureable in configuration.yml with the setting enabled by default.

It still doesn't feel 100% right, altough I can't really figure out why that is :) But I do think it is actually a good idea to nudge admins to actually run the migrations. In the end, we might try the middleware approach if that works for "common" upgrades. If there are some missing edge-cases, we may address them as they come up.