What are the benefits of using the Rails gem instead od vendor/rails?

Question

I recently started working on a small personal project in Ruby on Rails, and have run into a few things that I couldn't find definitive answers for. If anyone here is knowledgeable enough to help, that would be greatly appreciated. All of my questions are below:

• What benefit is there to using the Rails Gem instead of having it in vendor/rails?
• Is there any benefit to using Rails 2.3.2? Some of the plugins I hoped to use don't seem to be compatible with 2.3.2 (ActiveScaffold)? Does it offer a great improvement over 2.2?
• What is the benefit of using Ruby 1.9? Many plugins aren't yet compatible. Does it offer a great improvement over older versions?

Thanks for any help you guys might be able to offer.

Answer 1

1. vendor/rails probably makes your project more portable. Deployments that run the rake gems:install can act kind of wonky, especially if you upgrade a "Framework Gem" (you have to do these manually).

   The downside to vendor/rails is that it makes your deployment slightly bigger (more files that have to be pushed) but if you use git and something like Capistrano, this only bites you on the initial deploy... but its not that bad.

2. I don't think there are any huge benefits; it just depends on if you need features from 2.3.2. Obviously you want to try to run the latest version to make upgrades less painful. I've found that you always need to be upgrading the framework underneath Rails if you want to have any change of upgrading in the future.

3. Performance. As you pointed out though, a lot of plugins are broken. This is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem but overtime this should fix itself. We're not running 1.9 yet in any of our production apps because its too unstable with the rest of the stack.