[Myexperiment-discuss] Brief introduction, hello, and issue (not in that order)

[Pol Llovet]

Hello!

My name is Pol (pronounced 'paul'), and I am a rails developer working
with the MSU Research Computing Group.  We work on a bunch of
different things, it's all in ruby and it's all based in the problem
of scientific data management.

Anyway, I ran across myExperiment here at the CUAHSI HIS conference,
and was amazed that I had not run across it before.  Of course, I
immediately tried to get it running in my development system.  The
first thing I did was to port the source over into git, since that's
my preferred SCM. I created a mirror of the code on github
(github.com/pol/myexperiment), but I would be happy to delete it if
you guys created your own repo that I could fork from.

As you know, the rails environment for myexp is pretty old, so I have
run into some issues:

1) I am using RVM to manage my ruby version, and I am using
ruby-1.8.7-p334.  I am unable to use rubygems 0.9.4 since it throws an
error when you run `gem`. This also happens in ruby 1.8.6. As a
result, I am just using the most recent version of rubygems, let's see
if it breaks.

2) A similar thing happened with the ruby-openid.  I am using v2.1.8.
At this point, i just decided to ignore the "held back" versions and
I'm using a new version of rmagick too.  The only "old" version I am
using is rails at 1.2.6.

3) The preferred way for a new install to load the database is rake
db:schema:load, since it should be unnecessary to go through the
migration process to get to the current database state.  However, the
schema.rb is not stored in the repo for myexperiment.  Normally, I
would just migrate and add the schema.rb to my branch, but in this
case, I can't get the migration to run.  It errors out saying that it
is creating a table that is already created.  I don't get it, it looks
like the migrations are running twice or something.  Anyway, if
someone has a schema.rb file they could send me, I would appreciate
it.

4) The environment_private.rb file referenced in lots of the docs
seems to be deprecated in favor of the default_settings.yml file.
This settings file should probably be a .pre file like the other
install-specific config files. I have the patch in my 'pol' branch on
github if you want to apply it (see the commits here:
https://github.com/pol/myExperiment/commits/pol)

5) Are you guys maintaining any list of project milestones or todo
items?  I am interested in helping out and was not sure where to start
(I would probably start by creating a Rails 3 branch. :))

thanks,

- pol
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

pol m llovet
research computing group
montana state university

office: 406-994-3416
mobile: 406-646-6747