Globalize on Rails needs a quick patch…

Throughout my Rails journey I have come across a number of problems with various plugins. The globalize plugin is one which can completely localize an application through a database and some simple syntax. Chinese & English sites here I come…Anyhow during the install of Globalize for Rails 1.2 I came upon the following error and here is it’s solution if anyone needs it.

This has been tested on a fresh Globalize install on Debian, Rails 1.1, MySQL –version:
“mysql Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.32, for pc-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2″

Error
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** Execute globalize:create_tables rake aborted! Mysql::Error: #42000Identifier name ‘index_globalize_translations_on_table_name_and_item_id_and_language_id’ is too long: CREATE INDEX index_globalize_translations_on_table_name_and_item_id_and_language_id ON globalize_translations (table_name, item_id, language_id)
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Cause
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On Globalize Migration, line 32, an index to globalize_translations is created. However, this fails due to the index name being added as: add_index :globalize_translations, [ :table_name, :item_id, :language_id ]

… which in turn tries to create an index name of: index_globalize_translations_on_table_name_and_item_id_and_language_id

This is 70 characters, which exceeds the index identifier limit of 64 characters: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/identifiers.html
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Solution
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One solution is to rename the index name, in: globalize/generators/globalize/templates/migration.rb (migration.rb.gz:32 && tiny_migration.rb.gz:31)
…to:
add_index :globalize_translations, [ :table_name, :item_id, :language_id ], :name => ‘glb_trns_idx’
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If this is double dutch to you then pay no heed, it will definitely help out some poor other misfortunate person and save them some much valuable time in the future.