Sinatra has been slow to release a version compatible with AR 5,
so having a dev. dependency on sinatra has been painful. This is the
main reason for the move, but there are the other, usual reasons:
- Better organization of github issues
- Independent development. The sinatra integration can target older
versions of PT, for example.
- Rails users don't want sinatra integration in their apps, even if
it's basically inactive.
And, of course, there is the inevitable downside that sinatra integration
is now a second-class citizen. That's the trade-off with separate gems.
In https://github.com/airblade/paper_trail/pull/895, Sean asked:
> .. since it looks like the next version is planned to be 6.0.0, how would
> you feel about dropping support for Rails 3 in that version? It has
> reached end of life, meaning it no longer receives security patches. We
> don't recommend that gem authors continue to support it.
To which, I responded:
> We could continue maintaining PT 5 if we had to, so I think it's
> fine to drop support for rails 3 in PT 6. If Ben agrees, I'd be
> happy to make that change. I'll just update the gemspec and drop
> testing support, for starters. We can clean up the conditionals in
> the code over time.
