Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, they say, so I will not question how, or why, just express my happiness that my frustration is over: Redmine, the software package that I use internally for project management, works again.
It all began with an unpleasant but unavoidable upgrade of the MariaDB database from the ancient version that is part of the CentOS distribution to a more recent one. (Which, in turn, is needed to upgrade my content management software on some of my Web sites.)
Everything worked after this (planned, reasonably well pre-tested) upgrade except for Redmine.
Redmine is beautiful, very useful, but also very frustrating to install and manage. It uses Ruby on Rails, a software environment that… OK, let me not go there. I’ll keep my opinion to myself.
I spent countless hours yesterday, to no avail. The Redmine system refused to start. I installed, reinstalled, configured, reconfigured, uninstalled, reinstalled… Redmine, Ruby, its various management tools, you name it. Nothing did the trick. I gave up long after midnight.
I dreaded the moment today when I’d be resuming that thankless, frustrating exercise with no assured outcome. But I need Redmine. I have too much information in that system that I cannot afford to lose. So eventually I rolled up my sleeves (literally) opened the browser tab that had the link, and hit F5 to refresh the page, expecting the same error message that I’ve seen before to reappear.
Instead… Redmine came up in all its glory, with all my existing project data intact. Everything works.
I was so shocked by surprise I almost felt physically ill. A bit like this Midjourney cat, upon receiving an unexpected, very welcome gift.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth they say, so I am not complaining. But I’d still like to know what exactly happened. Why things started to work all of a sudden. I told my beautiful wife to imagine leaving a half-finished knitted sweater in her room one night, only to come back the next morning and finding a beautifully finished sweater there.
My mind, for now, is in a deeply boggled state. I honestly don’t know how or why it happened. But I am a very happy cat tonight.
A footnote: After I wrote the above, late, late, late at night, all of a sudden Redmine failed again, with a different error. I was ready to tear my hair out. But I was able to fix the problem. The likeliest cause as far as I could determine is that although the Redmine site had the correct Ruby version identified, a default setting specified an older, incompatible version of Ruby. It was fortunate that I was able to fix it, otherwise chances are I’d have spent a sleepless night trying.