Fixing Resque

Since redis-rb 2.0.0 came out, a lot of Resque users realized that redis-namespace (a Resque dependency) was incompatible with the most recent Redis client. It didn’t come as a surprise: I even notified Chris Wanstrath (author of Resque and redis-namespace) about this issue when we were rolling release candidates. At that time, his proposed solution was to lock Resque to redis-rb 1.0.x. I also hinted that once Redis 2 comes out, the old client would no longer work because of a change in the protocol.

For some background, Resque is a Redis-backed Ruby library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later. It uses redis-namespace, a 187 sloc gem that adds a Redis::Namespace class which can be used to namespace Redis keys.

Yesterday, a discussion took place in #redis regarding redis-namespace compatibility with redis-rb 2.0.0. There even was a suggestion to incorporate redis-namespace into redis-rb, so all libraries could profit from that solution. Even if I opposed that move (I consider redis-namespace the wrong solution to a simple problem), the underlying issue was not with redis-namespace, but with Resque itself. None of the participants in that discussion were direct redis-namespace users: they only wanted Resque to work with redis-rb 2.0.0.

Not being a Resque user myself, I had not bothered looking at its code before. Turns out I was able to make Resque 100% compatible with redis-rb 2.0.0 by replacing redis-namespace with… nothing. It wasn’t needed at all, and the namespacing functionality is now handled by an attr_accessor called namespace.

This code lives at my without-redis-namespace branch. I sent a pull request yesterday, I hope it will be incorporated soon to the main repository.