Sporkmonger

I released a new version of FeedTools to address a couple of nagging issues. First, I finally tracked down the second issue with uninitialized constants (the first one was RUBYOPT). Thanks Benoit Domingue for all the help with that! Anyways, apparently, you also get the same error (or a similar one) if the iconv library is missing. FeedTools now drops a warn if you’re missing the iconv library instead of the completely unrelated ActiveSupport error you currently get with 0.2.8 and earlier.

I also updated the feed generation code to fix some issues with missing namespaces. You should now always see validating output from the generation methods.

There is also now a dependancy on UUIDTools because of the need to have proper unique ids for atom output.

I finally figured out what was causing the “constant already initialized” errors for some people. It turns out that if you have the RUBYOPT environment variable set unnecessarily, in certain circumstances, rubygems will attempt to require the gem twice for some reason. I added a small check that ought to detect this condition and raise an exception if it occurs (preventing the second load, as well as hopefully letting the programmer know how to fix the issue).

I think I also fixed the bug where FeedTools would error out if the http header hash stored as YAML in the database got corrupted. It should now assume that it’s starting from a clean slate if the cache field contains invalid YAML.

A custom inspect method was also implemented to make irb usage more sane.

UPDATE: After further investigation, it appears to be a combined effect from ActiveSupport, Rubygems, and RUBYOPT. This problem may alternatively (and probably more commonly) have been caused by people who were missing the iconv library.

In case it hasn’t already become apparent, if you’re not already requiring your code against a specific version of FeedTools, you should be.

Obviously, I’ve been following the “release early, release often” mantra lately. And almost without fail, with every release of the library, I clean up the API a bit somehow. Obviously, it would be kinda less than optimal if you updated the gem, only to discover that the new version is only 99% compatible with the previous one. This kind of change does happen, and I quite purposely intend it to happen.

So… please be sure you’re doing something like this:

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require_gem 'feedtools', '= 0.2.5'

By which I mean, version 0.2.5 has been released and the API is ever-so-slightly cleaner than before. The main change was a bug fix for table creation problems with PostgreSQL and Sqlite.

For those that care, the library is at 112 tests and 552 assertions now.