Rails 1.1.1 Gives Spurious Warnings

Rails 1.1.1 got pushed yesterday, fixing a number of issues with the massive 1.1 release.

One attempted fix, however, seems to have backfired. Many folks who aren’t developers use the Typo blog, normally hosted on an ISP such as Textdrive or Dreamhost. When those ISPs upgraded to 1.1, a change in the way Rails handles loading its environment broke Typo, and all the blogs stopped working. In a well intentioned (if somewhat hasty) reponse, Rails was modified in 1.1.1 to record its version when you first create an application. It then uses RubyGems to ensure that the application continues to use that version of Rails. Of course this only applies to new applications, so it doesn’t fix the Typo issue, but longer term it will allow applications to continue to run when new releases introduce incompatibilities.

However, this change has brought with it an unfortunate side effect. Now, when you run script/generate for controllers, and models, you’ll see a warning:

  ./script/../config/../config/environment.rb:8: warning: already
         initialized constant RAILS_GEM_VERSION

This is apparently benign, so the advice from Rails core is to live with it until 1.1.2.