Dr David GuestJul 14, 2023
Tom Morris

Getting this old Rails 4 app running in a Docker container and all the dependencies to work took about three hours.

Having to write Rails today is the punishment for having written Rails in the past.

Jul 14, 2023 at 5:27pmWeb
Show threadTom MorrisJul 14, 2023

Rails has got so much cruft in it I cannot even fathom.

Gotta have libxml2 installed, so Nokogiri can compile. Why does Rails need Nokogiri? For two things.

1. ActionText, a rich text editor that most Rails developers likely never use.

2. XmlMini in Active Support, some helper classes for serializing to XML in a generic way. Again, most people don't use it.

Put those in separate gems and you'd avoid tens of thousands of libxml2 downloads and CPU cycle hours pointlessly building Nokogiri.