Rails 1.2, which came out on January 19th, 2007, includes a lot of new features, amongst others better Unicode support, support for RESTful coding, and a better routing system. It's important to update to Rails version 1.2 to keep Chameleon up-to-date, secure and stable.
We upgrade from Rails 1.1.6 to 1.2.6, which currently is the latest release in the 1.2 series. It's possible a 1.2.7 version will be released in future, but no ETA is available. When development on this spec began, 1.2.3 still was the latest version, so three upgrades were executed in the rails-1-2 branch. This however didn't impose any large problems, as 1.2.4, 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 are labeled as a "drop-in replacement" for 1.2.3.
The upgrade to Rails 1.2 takes place in the rails-1-2 bzr branch. First, the current, frozen Rails 1.1.6 installation was replaced with Rails 1.2.3, then 1.2.5, and later 1.2.6. Next, all code that stopped working should be fixed, and deprecated code should be removed. After an update with the trunk, a working Chameleon based on Rails 1.2.6 can be pushed to the trunk. It's possible that any branches active at that point will have to fix incompatibilities too. Additionally, the routing system will be reworked to take advantage of the new routing system in Rails 1.2.
A list of deprecated functions can be found on the Ruby on Rails website.
The unit tests, which are implemented concurrently with this spec, can be used to search for incompatibilities between the Chameleon code based on Rails 1.1.6 and 1.2.6, and things that aren't working the way they should.
This spec is completed. The only deprecated code we still depend on is for the pagination. (—JW, 2008-03-15)
