Ruby on Rails drives me nuts, and today I found another example of why: the cryptic error messages. After a server update, my chiliproject/redmine site refused to start. The error message was
“Object is not missing constant Issue!”
What does that even mean? It took me a little while to understand that Issue in this context is the Redmine object “Issue”. But still, “Object is not missing constant X” isn’t much help. I tried “bundle install” to make sure all my gems were in place, and there was no problem there.
In the end, on a hunch - gah I hate fixing things based on hunches - I tried uninstalling the mysql gem. That was the only subsystem which was updated which I could imagine interfering with Redmine. I tried to reinstall it the normal way: gem install mysql, which seemed to go without a hitch. But then Redmine insisted that I was missing some gems.
So I tried to use bundle install to make sure I didn’t lose anything else, and it just hung at Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/. I don’t know why. I have no problem reaching that URL from the server, and it doesn’t give me any more information.
Finally I tried skipping the bundle installer, and just specifying the same old version of mysql to reinstall with gem install –version ‘= 2.8.1’ mysql. It worked, and I have my PM system back. Huzzah.
One of these days I’m just gonna build a feature-for-feature Redmine clone in Drupal, just out of frustration.