# Woes of read-the-code documentation **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [January 5, 2008, 8:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094 "2008-01-05T08:33:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2008, 8:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/1 "2008-01-05T08:33:50Z")
Recently I ran into an terrible bug. While working in my Radiant site on my local machine and navigating thru my Radiant site, suddenly the after one click too many the styling of the site went away. After a few minutes I discovered that the contents of my entire “public” folder were deleted. This behavior was almost virus like. Ugh. If you’re like me when you get the time to develop your own personal projects, its a flurry of effort and you’re changing all kinds of things. My point here is I had my hand in so many pies I hardly knew where to look or what I might have done to create the issue. I was setting up Capistrano which uses delete commands, so that seemed a possibility. I installed the back\_door extension which allows for embedded ruby, so I wondered if I might have coded something in a ruby tag inadvertently. There were a number of rocks to look under. As far as I knew I hadn’t written any code related to deleting files, so I was perplexed. Eventually when the problem reappeared it was on the host. After some effort I was able to identify the exact action that resulted in the issue. From the admin interface, I accessed the users, selected a user, updated that user and saved that user. Anytime I took these steps, sure enough, my entire public folder got wiped out. Thank the programmer gods for SVN. If not for this backup, it would have been disaster. These disappearing files weren’t even ending up in my trash bin. After looking under numerous rocks an idea occurred about what it might have been that I had done. Recently, in order to allow for more dynamic pages, I had to turn off caching. Whether documented or not, I fished thru the code and ended up coding this in my environment.rb to turn off caching: ResponseCache.instance.perform\_caching = false # the culprit ResponseCache.defaults[:directory] = ActionController::Base.page\_cache\_directory ResponseCache.defaults[:logger] = ActionController::Base.logger It seemed a logical assumption. Plus it actually worked, after testing I could see that there was no caching. Problem solved, on my merry way. The trouble is, this ended up in a discrete error that didn’t surface until later, as described earlier. I didn’t figure out exactly why updating a user caused this to happen but I did determine the actual code that destroyed my public directory could be found in Radiant’s response\_cache.rb. # Expires the entire cache. def clear Dir["#{directory}/\*"].each do |f| FileUtils.rm\_rf f end end Now mind you, if you use Radiant properly this chunk of code won’t bake your cookies. I made a mistaken assumption about how to turn caching off. (Actually, the line simply appeared too early; it should have appeared a few lines down.) Later, I discovered the lines of caching code were already available to me in the config/environment/ subdirectory. Oftentimes, I hear programmers tell you the best documentation is the code itself. They recommend that you read the code. Granted, I did a pretty boneheaded thing, but when you’re in flow programming away and you want to do something which, at heart, seems quite simple, you don’t want to spend the in-depth time learning all the facets of that thing, by inspecting every line of code. You want a quick answer. Ruby is a language that has so much power and complexity related to its dynamic nature, that it’s quite easy to miss some significant things a chunk of code is doing. After more than 6 months, I still spot chunks of Ruby code that are mind-numbing. All I can say is the read-the-code form of documentation is not ranked highly in my book. If Ruby had a dynamic IDE debugger on par with Visual Studio, it might be much easier to learn from the code. But as it stands I usually resort to dumping displays to the console in punchcard-programmer fashion. As a final note: we might want to put some safegaurds in the above routine to avoid bonehead blunders like my own. Deleting everything in a directory is quite a drastic action! ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2008, 7:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/2 "2008-01-05T19:25:27Z")
Hi Mario, Sorry to hear about your problems – that sounds like it could have seriously sucked without source control! I was wondering though: what kind of safe-guards you’d want to incorporate in the caching mechanism? I agree that clearing a directory is dangerous, but IIRC, default Rails caching does something similar (maybe with options for more fine-grained control). Out of curiosity, why did you change the cache directory if you had turned off caching? (That was the problem here, right? That Rails page caching goes to the public dir?) -Andrew ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2008, 5:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/3 "2008-01-05T17:03:09Z")
I apologize for coming across a little harsh. No disrespect intended to anyone. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2008, 7:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/4 "2008-01-05T19:50:05Z")
Theoretically, one could modify the ResponseCache class to use memcached. I wonder what the performance increases would be like. However, you are right in suspecting that the directory change is the problem… the default environment.rb sets the ActionController cache directory to RAILS\_ROOT/cache IIRC. Sean ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 12:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/5 "2008-01-08T00:40:45Z")
> Have you tried Netbeans 6? It’s as good as Visual Studio given the > limitations of a dynamically-typed language. The last time I checked Netbeans wasn’t ready, but that was a while ago. I’ll soon look at it again, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2008, 3:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/6 "2008-01-07T15:37:04Z")
All I can say is the read-the-code form of documentation is not ranked highly in my book. If Ruby had a dynamic IDE debugger on par with Visual Studio, it might be much easier to learn from the code. But as it stands I usually resort to dumping displays to the console in punchcard-programmer fashion. Have you tried Netbeans 6? It’s as good as Visual Studio given the limitations of a dynamically-typed language. ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2008, 5:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/7 "2008-01-10T05:02:50Z")
I’ve spent a little time with Netbeans 6.0 and it is definitely looking sharp. The best Ruby environment I’ve seen. Very nice interface that’s not too busy. Debugging support looks great at first glance. ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mario\_TSL](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mario_TSL)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2008, 9:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/woes-of-read-the-code-documentation/125094/8 "2008-02-01T21:04:42Z")
Also, Activestate Komodo is a nice environment with debugging that is pretty good - but slow on my 1.6 PentiumM Laptop. -topher On Jan 9, 2008 8:02 PM, Mario T. Lanza [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Post: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid > Search: [http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/](http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/) > Site: [http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant](http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant) – Christopher Z. removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid 604-484-9279