It's interesting that it doesn't really read fundamentally different than the release notes of the most unfashionable and enterpriesiest frameworks out there. "Enjoy the great advances of the generalized Smimgle API while ensuring to convert your Smapti configuration file. A conversion script is provided. The framework now supports Glump and Froffle including some experimental functionality that can be activated with the --zugzug flag"
Keyword was 'reads like'. Try reading it imagining you didn't know much about Rails and its terminology. You'll learn the release is a 'landmark'. And that, apparently, we now live in a world enriched by the fulfillment of the Merb Promise of 2008.
It's not a changelist, although it does link to one. "These release notes cover the major upgrades, but don’t include every little bug fix and change." It's exactly what it says, release notes. I didn't say it wasn't or that it was a product landing page. They're release notes rather reminiscent of product release notes that excitedly told you all about CORBA integration and ODBC 2 support.
I noted this as well when I upgraded my blog to Rails 3 during the bugmash last month. Rails suddenly has a lot more moving parts, and understanding the internals is much more difficult than it used to be. However as a Rails developer for almost 5 years (gosh has it been that long?) every single change adds an order of magnitude more flexibility than complexity. The surface API has grown remarkably little, but the modularity and internal API stability is dramatically improved.
The days of Rails being the scrappy upstart are over, but I think the culture and capabilities of Ruby have largely prevented the nightmarish type of scenarios that J2EE developed a reputation for. I guess it's only fair to give it another 5-10 years and see what it looks like, but developing with Rails feels just as agile as ever even if the learning curve has been steepened.
Soon (hopefully that was vague enough). According to DHH - "Rails 3 beta is almost ready for public testing. We're just hammering out the last bugs in Bundler. Stay tuned." [1].
As far as I can tell from watching commits/tweets/etc, the finishing touches are being put on now. It sounds like there is still some work to be done on Bundler as well as finishing up javascript handling. Other than that, I believe that all of the big pieces are in place and ready for a beta.
Hopefully someone on the core team who reads HN can chime in with a better response.
We've been putting on the finishing touches since the weekend. At the moment, we've been running through the startup experience over and over, clearing any rough bits that are low-hanging fruit.
We've been working on the new bundler, which makes the normal unbundled experience as safe and isolated using system gems (the "default" experience) as when you explicitly lock the dependencies. We cleared a bunch of small bugs today and are coming in for a landing.
I can't recommend RVM highly enough. Not only will it let you easily switch between MRI (the standard ruby interpreter) versions. It'll also let you switch just as easily between other interpreters such as JRuby, Rubinius, Ruby Enterprise Edition, etc.
Hivelogic has good overall instructions on installing your own version of ruby in /usr/local here: http://hivelogic.com/articles/ruby-rails-leopard
The steps are the same for installing 1.8.7 or 1.9, you just change the version of Ruby that you download.
Other people have mentioned RVM, so I don't need to, but you may also want to check out JRuby (http://jruby.org). Your startup time will suffer, but your runtime will be quite a bit faster. :)
