Been spending way too much time with Capistrano recently, and it stops now. It’s quite possibly useful to me in my current projects, but its user-hostility makes it not worth the time.

As I searched and read page after web page, trying to find a pointer to how to use Cap in my environment (svn is on my development machine, not on a server somewhere else) without success, I began getting a feel for the attitude surrounding Cap, and frankly, I didn’t like it much. One article about doing this had several comments to the effect of “this capability is built in to version 2; this article is deprecated.” Of course, not one of them pointed to where I could find out about how to make version 2 use it.

The moment of my departure from Capistrano came when I ran across several exchanges about the (lack of) documentation for version 2. One of the respondents suggested the person looking for information could always read the code.

Yep, that’s what I’m wanting to to: stop working on my own projects, drop everything, and dig through code I’m completely unfamiliar with, just on the off-chance that it does what I need it to do. Yep. That’ll happen. Real Soon Now. Right after my snowball fight with Satan.

Deploying without Cap in my world isn’t that hard: svn export, followed by using Transmit to sync files with the production server. Perhaps Cap could automate that process. So can perl, or a dozen other tools in my box.

I looked to Cap because that was supposedly the way to deploy Rails apps. Instead I found a priesthood, hiding their secrets from all but the acolytes who approach them on bended knee, begging for crumbs of light. Thanks anyway.

I’ll do it myself.