Where is the Rails bug tracker?

The Ruby-on-Rails website has a link (“Get involved”) with a speech bubble picture, in which the words “bug tracker” (among other things) are contained. However, the link takes you to another page which links to a whole bunch of stuff, none of which is a bug tracker.

Hmm, there seems to be a tracker here:

http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/overview

… but that doesn’t seem to have bug #3231 which was mentioned here:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/39270

… and which I recently stumbled on.

It’s all very chaotic and unsatisfying. Much like Ruby programming…

Re-thinking the website sign-up

There are a bunch of websites where you have to sign up as a user, a proces which normally requires that you hand over an email address which the site will validate by sending you an email with some sort of secret token (a URL) that you need to actually activate the account. As it happens, I’m implementing such a feature at the moment. Assuming that these sites aren’t actually harvesting the addresses for purposes of on-selling them or spamming them directly, it’s usually because they need a way to do things like:

• prevent a single person from creating an unlimited number of accounts
• prevent all but the most clever bots from creating accounts
• permanently ban troublesome users

All of these are perfectly valid concerns. Most sites that I am aware of require you to provide an email address when you create your account, at which time you also choose your username and password (and provide whatever other details are deemed necessary). However, there are problems with this approach, and I think there’s a better way to do it.

Psi release announcement

Apparently Psi releases are announced on Freshmeat before being announced on the Psi website? WTF?

Edit 23/10/07: The website has finally been updated. It took a few days.

Eclipse website

What the hell is the matter with the people who design the eclipse website? It’s not clear what the latest release is nor how to find out (3.3.1, I think). When I click “download” the choice I am presented with is a bunch of language IDEs – why can’t I download the components like I used to be able to? Ok, I can; I have to “browse downloads by project” – which is hidden in a small box at the right of the download page – then choose “Eclipse Platform” (or JDT or PDE, which link to the same destination, though other items under the “Eclipse Project” don’t) – then click on the release which it turns out is 3.3.1 – then I can view the readme, and a list of components which can be downloaded.

Of course they’re not strictly speaking components seeing as some seem to contain others. Maybe. At least, I was able to get Eclipse running without downloading the “RCP Runtime Binary” (RCP = Rich Client Platform) which sounds fairly important, I’m assuming it’s included in the “Platform Runtime Binary”. I could be wrong. In any case an explanation of what each bit actually is wouldn’t be unwelcome.

The readme, incidentally, does contain a chapter 7 which lists bugs fixed between 3.3.1 and 3.3, however this chapter doesn’t appear in the table of contents at the beginning of the document for some unfathomable reason. And there doesn’t seem to be a list of actual changes between the 3.2 and 3.3 series anywhere. I presume there was some reason for calling it 3.3 instead of 3.2.3? (and perhaps a reason also for not displaying the version in the startup splash window anymore?)