A frog by any other name…

Just a quick heads up: The Airbrake Notifier’s repository is now http://github.com/airbrake/airbrake instead of being under the thoughtbot account. The URLs will still work for now because there’s a fork under thoughtbot, but that will be going away in a week or two, so update your sources. Any pull requests or github issues you had on the notifier have also been moved over, so make sure you check the right project in case you think yours went missing.

This won’t affect anyone who’s using the gem in their Gemfile, so we’d encourage you to use that instead of pulling directly from git.

Ruby’s pessimistic operator

Do you know Ruby’s pessimistic operator? It looks like this:

~>

You’ve seen it in some Gemfiles. Here’s an example

gem 'rails', '~> 3.0.3'
gem 'thin',  '~> 1.1'

~> 3.0.3 means that when you bundle install, you’ll get the highest-released gem version of rails between the range >= 3.0.3 and < 3.1.

~> 1.1 means that when you bundle install, you’ll get the highest-released gem version of thin between the range >= 1.1 and < 2.0.

Using the pessimistic operator in combination with consistent Semantic versioning by gem authors, we can theoretically achieve better stability in our dependencies.

Read more on the tradeoffs or read our current guidelines on Bundler.

Written by Dan Croak.