Will there ever be a 1.3.0 release?

[Quintus]

The title basically says all. Last commit on master is about a year old, the 1.3.0 milestone is due for over a year now. Does it even make sense to build a web application relying on DataMapper now? I’ve always preferred DataMapper to ActiveRecord, but given the stalled development this does not seem a good choice anymore.

Valete.

[dkubb]

Check the release-1.2 branch for the gems you're using. Most of them have recent commits, sometimes multiple.

We need to have a better job of merging those back into the master branches, they it needs some testing. If you're interested in helping with this we'd love the help.

[dkubb]

@badshark asked me about this ticket via email and how he could help, and I replied with this email. I thought it might be helpful for others to see who are wanting to help with DM development:

The first thing I would do is join the #datamapper and #rom-rb IRC channels on freenode. That's where most development discussion happens. I'm "dkubb" on IRC.

As far as next steps I've been keeping the release-1.2 branches up to date, but I haven't had time to merge them back into the master branch yet. That's probably the first thing I would need help with. We have a decent CI system setup, so it should be clear when the build breaks, and I would want to make sure it's always in a passing state if possible.

If you want to start with opening a PR on dm-core that backports the release-1.2 changes to master (and fixes the conflicts of course) we can start with that and get the main issues out of the way before moving onto the other gems. In general dm-core sets the standard that the other gems need to meet, so we'll work on getting things squared away properly there first and the other gems should mostly follow the same pattern.

In case you're wondering my priority level of the gems for this kind of change, I would roughly list them as:

• dm-core
• dm-constraints
• dm-migrations
• dm-timestamps
• dm-transactions
• dm-types
• dm-validations
• dm-do-adapter
• dm-postgres-adapter
• dm-mysql-adapter
• dm-sqlite-adapter
• dm-active_model
• dm-rails

The next thing I would like to do with DM is integrate devtools with dm-core and the other gems. We're using this on ROM to make sure the code quality stays or improves on future commits. While DM development has slowed, I would still want to make sure that all new code we add is of the same level of quality as what we're doing in ROM.

I think we can add this to the master branch and then cherry-pick it into the release-1.2 branch. In fact I kind of wish we had been doing this all along, rather than developing in release-1.2 and then having to backport it; but I think we've learned it's not the best approach for keeping things up to date.

[nmccready]

Is there a gem repo that has 1.2.2 with in it? Also why is there a 1.2.1 dm-rails within gems list --remote, but it is not tagged on github?

[snusnu]

@nmccready just as a heads up: #259

i guess any help will be very much appreciated

[jf]

if I could just ask (because it's not readily apparent?), is DM now going away, and ROM (rom-rb.org) the new project to follow? Or is ROM going to be a fork of DM, while the development of DM still carries on with 1.x?

[nmccready]

@snusnu thanks! and @jf good info!

[solnic]

@jf no, ROM is a separate project and it's not replacing anything. It's a new thing, that is all. I cannot speak for @dkubb or @snusnu but personally I'm no longer working on DM as my main focus now is ROM.

[luissalazar]

Can you guys clarify something for me? How is ROM better than DataMapper? I mean no disrespect, I wonder for real :) I have a hard time accepting not being able to use DataMapper with Rails 4, and quite honestly, I cannot figure out how ROM is better. Is there any news about DataMapper per se and its future?

Thanks a lot guys. Your work is simply amazing. Both with ROM and DM (even more with DM lol)

[nixtrace]

@luissalazar ROM takes a very different approach to object mapping, as @solnic said it's a new project, not replacing DataMapper. I love where ROM is going, but I keep using DataMapper on production apps for now, so I definitely understand your concerns 😄

Ideally I'd like to keep DataMapper fresh until ROM will have a stable API.

I'm trying to merge all the fixes and small features that have been added to the release branch on the master branch, and after that release a new DataMapper version.

We're almost there: #259

Can you help us? 😄

[solnic]

@luissalazar I no longer maintain projects where DM is used so I don't have motivation to work on it as I'm focusing on ROM these days. Just like @badshark wrote - ROM is a different project and its highly experimental, we are still discovering how some things could be done and it's gonna take a lot of time to make it production ready.

[luissalazar]

@badshark Yeap, that I had it clear (the new approach from ROM [more like a conceptual real DataMapper]), but DM is such a lovely piece of software, it hurts not to be able to use in fresh projects... sits & cries hehehe
I would love too :) Don't know exactly how or if useful in any way, but I could give it a try :)

@solnic I understand.

Thank you guys for answering my questions. As I have said before, DM is just a wonderful piece of technology. I passively come to its github page occasionally with melancholic feelings :P hehe

Best regards from Costa Rica.

[basex]

guys do you have any upgrade path to move out of datamapper to one of the other ORM gems (rom, sequel, activerecord)? I tried this gem https://github.com/engineyard/ardm but it was not very straightforward to me.

[solnic]

@basex I can't imagine any upgrade path from DM to ROM other than a partial rewrite of the models and everything that interacts with them. Persistence layer is handled in a completely different way in ROM. Once ROM is close to 1.0.0 I'm happy to provide help with upgrading though, just ping me.

[martinemde]

I just noticed ardm was mentioned here. We're still actively developing ardm because our main app is locked in to DataMapper (we've hacked up to rails4 but otherwise we're in the same boat as many others).

My hope is that we can almost completely shim datamapper on top of active record. We've had a lot of success so far. I urge you to contact me directly or file issues on engineyard/ardm (even if they're just "wtf?" issues) and I'll do my best to answer them and improve documentation.

[basex]

I noticed some commits on the last days. So maybe we will have a a 1.3.0 version after all :)
https://github.com/datamapper/dm-core/blob/master/lib/dm-core/version.rb