Capistrano and the Rails Application Lifecycle
by Tom Mornini, Marc Loy

The unconfirmed error reports are from readers.  They have not yet been 
approved or disproved by the author or editor and represent solely the
opinion of the reader.

Here's a key to the markup:
        [page-number]: serious technical mistake
        {page-number}: minor technical mistake
        <page-number>: important language/formatting problem
        (page-number): language change or minor formatting problem
        ?page-number?: reader question or request for clarification

This page was updated March 23, 2007.


UNCONFIRMED  errors and comments from readers: 


{54}  Top half of page;
The :setup_public_folder task seems awkward. Setting vars and calling
Cap tasks works, but is awkward. Capistrano tasks seem to break down 
when they need to pass around a lot of variables, which is why the 
Capistrano plugin system is built in.

So a better strategy would be to either monkeypatch Actor and call :copy_and_filter
as a normal method with arguments, or write it as a Capistrano plugin.

module Copier

  def copy_and_filter(mode, src, dest, token, value)
    # ...
  end

end

Capistrano.plugin :copier, Copier

# copier.copy_and_filter(...)


{55}  Top of page;
The example of the :mongrel_configuration_setup task seems unnecessarily 
complicated. The example uses "#{deploy_to}/#{shared_dir}", but the 
built-in :shared_path variable already provides the full path to the 
shared directory and could be used instead.

To see this, call this task in a Capistrano recipe:

desc "Show vars"
task :show_vars do
  [shared_path, current_path].each do |var|
    puts var
  end
end


=> /u/apps/myapp.com/shared
=> /u/apps/myapp.com/current


{59}  Row 17 of table;
The default value of :svn is said to be "/opt/local/bin/svn". This is incorrect.

The given path is mentioned as an example in the Capistrano documentation, but this
is not a default. The default is "svn" as seen on line 78 of scm/subversion.rb


(64)  Bottom of page;
The command references ssth-keygen, but there should be no 't'.

As a side note, why give instructions for copying ssh keys to a remote server? 
This would be a great Capistrano task! (See also: deprec gem, which I contribute to).