a view from afar

In a mission to get Sven Fuch's Mephisto plugin Tag Cloud working, I decided to upgrate to Mephisto-trunk (revision 3005). Ultimately it was successful (this blog is now being served by the Mephisto-trunk), but here are some things you should know...

1. You will need Rails 2.0

Or more specifically, the preview release:

    % sudo gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org/

or (in your Mephisto directory)

    % rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-0_PR

2. Mephisto Depends on ActionWebService

Specifically, the mephisto_xmlrpc plugin. Not sure what it is used for, but Mephisto won't run without it.

3. Rails 2.0 has pulled ActionWebService

And no newer gem is available from the preview repository. This breaks mephisto_xmlrpc, and will give you errors like this:

    ** Starting Rails with production environment...
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:304:
    in `report_activate_error': RubyGem version error:
    actionpack(1.13.5.7919 not = 1.13.5) (Gem::LoadError)

Having Rails load two versions of each gem is possibly not the best thing you can do, so for the mean time I have commented out the entire contents of vendor/plugins/mephisto_xmlrpc/init.rb:

    # require 'action_web_service'

Not sure what that breaks, but it un-breaks everything else, so I'm happy to compromise.