Ignore the users.nearby column

[gravitystorm]

This is the first step of removing the column, see #2417. It needs to be deployed before a migration to remove it, since the columns are cached in ActiveRecord and things break if objects exist in memory
that expect the database column to be there.

Thanks to strong_migrations for pointing this out when I tried creating the migration first!

[tomhughes]

Well if you really want to pander to strong_migrations extremist nonsense...

[gravitystorm]

Well if you really want to pander to strong_migrations extremist nonsense...

I'm surprised by your attitude here @tomhughes, it's not very helpful.

Without doing this, if we just ran the migration to drop the column, then anyone in the middle of doing anything with a User object (i.e. already read from the database and then writing to the database) can receive an error. Creating a user, updating their preferences, etc. So you run the migration, and people see errors. I want to avoid that.

I don't consider this to be "pandering to ... extremist nonsense" and it's a) a pretty trivial solution and b) not something that I'm burdening you with.

If I haven't yet convinced you that strong_migrations is useful, then fine, you don't have to agree. But I find it useful, and I like doing migrations properly, so I'll continue to use it.

[tomhughes]

Yes it might cause a breakage for the couple of minutes between me running the migration and then doing a coordinated deployment on the web servers.

I just think that this, like many of strong_migrations suggestions, creates a lot of work and litters the source with residual noise, for very minimal gains. I believe I made my views on this known when we originally added it ;-)

[gravitystorm]

I just think that this ... creates a lot of work

Creates a lot of work? The two options are:

a) run a migration, which breaks things in production, or
b) apply this one-line patch. Later, run exactly the same migration as in a). Finally, remove this one-line from the source.

Seems like an easy choice to me.

[tomhughes]

I was assuming you would leave it in. Yes I know that doesn't actually help but it's easy to think it does unless you think it through carefully ;-)