sassc dependency break installation on old servers

[philayres]

I see the recent change to use sassc rather than the deprecated sass gem. It obviously makes sense to make a move onto a supported gem.

The challenge is that this new requirement is specific to jquery-fileupload-rails in an older Rails 4.2 project I'm maintaining. At this point in time, the sass -> sassc switch has not been made elsewhere in the stack. I was surprised when a recent build I tried to do failed.

It seems that sassc depends on libsass. This has specific compiler requirements for the native components, and these are not met on the old CentOS 6 server I'm having to run in production. The gem just won't install. The challenge is that CentOS 6 is supported for another 2 years, and my very conservative / under-resourced IT group is not ready to make the move (either to building a new compiler, or upgrading to CentOS 7).

I'm just letting you know, in case others suddenly arrive saying that their builds are breaking due to sassc.

I don't expect this project to make any changes (I have just pegged my Gemfile version of this gem to 0.4.7 prior to the change). It will be worth keeping an eye on where the Rails stack goes with this. The currently open Rails issue I have seen rails/rails#32896 doesn't seem to have made a decision on direction for sass.

That's all. Feel free to keep this open if it is useful for other poor souls on 8 year old OSs that might suddenly find everything broke.

[felixbuenemann]

The major version was bumped for the change, indicating a breaking change, so as long as you specify your versions in your Gemfile cautiously enough you should be fine (eg. ~> 0 or ~> 0.4).