Speed bumps on the way to production

I've been working for a few weeks on a Rails-based application that allows our campus to create, manage, and subscribe to podcasts. Much like the online employment applicaiton, writing this application has been a learning process (see some of my previous posts to get an idea of things I've encountered). Overall, the process has been smooth and the development timeline linear.

However, in the last few days, I've hit a few snags that have really irked me. Some of these probably should be tackled by someone more adept than I at Ruby and Rails.

1. The file_column plugin is broken. It has not been updated since November or something. There's a version in branches/kyle that sort-of works, but takes out the RMagick capabilities (which I happen to need and why I considered the plugin in the first place).


2. As a corollary to the previous item, RMagick 1.10 is not available for Windows, so if I do use it (with or without file_column), there may be incompatibilities between my server and my dev machine.


3. The plugin script needs the ability to add the svn:externals property for all installed plugins. If you forget the little -x switch, good luck getting the format correct in SVN. I'd much rather do:

   script/plugin set_externals

   or something like that. It could even use the discovered repositories to set the property and ignore all others.