djwonk

I found myself wondering about the planned transition from Merb 1.X to Rails 3. I did a little reading and research and would like to share the best information that I’ve found.

On June 28, Yehuda Katz said “we are ABSOLUTELY still planning on an easy transition path” [from Merb 1.X to Rails 3] in a helpful Merb mailing list discussion. The next day on the mailing list, Yehuda elaborated:

All the work [on Rails] we [(meaning Yehuda and Carl)] have done so far (and some we have yet to do) will make that transition possible. We could have started releasing some transitional releases [for Merb] over the past six months, but that would have been mostly guesswork, and we likely would have needed several different releases, requiring app changes, as we continued our work in Rails. As Ezra said, Merb is mostly stable at this point, and we’d like to keep it that way until we can offer something clear and compelling. We have some more work to do, but making it possible to transition smoothly remains a high priority for the Rails 3 release for Carl and I.

Bayard Randel asks on Stack Overflow: “I’d really like to know if it would be worth starting development in Merb now and then porting it to Rails, but I’ve yet to find anything suggesting how difficult this may be.” This is a shorter page, but the takeaway is clear: “If you’re using Merb today, continue using Merb. If you’re considering using Merb for a project because it works better for your needs, use Merb.” This quote is from Yehuda’s December 23, 2008 post that announced the Rails / Merb merger.

In terms of specific Merb releases: back in March, Matt Aimonetti talked about the Merb 1.1 roadmap which at the moment seems to be taking a bit longer than expected. You can find the Merb master branch on GitHub, which indicates the latest tagged release is 1.0.10.