Cocaine was originally extracted from how Paperclip handled shelling out its commands to ImageMagick. I named it “Cocaine” because, one, I really enjoy puns and, two, I fully didn’t expect anyone else to use it.

But, as they say, no matter what you assume, people will do something differently. Is that what they say? Anyway, point is that people used it and had opinions about the name. Relevant opinions, and not all of them complementary. “It’s in poor taste.” “It’s juvenile.” “It’s not something you really want to have in your search history at work.” “It’s just stupid.” And now I’m at the point where I agree with all of these.

So in light of making things better, no matter how entrenched it might be, I’m renaming Cocaine to Terrapin because turtles are cool.

The discussion started in earnest a while ago. The most recent one was recorded in this GitHub issue.

Going Forward

Terrapin is being released as version 0.6.0, and Cocaine’s final version will also be 0.6.0. Both projects will have an 0.6.0.alpha version for a week or two (as of this article) and then the real 0.6.0 will be released.

The old Cocaine gem will continue to work, and the newest version, 0.6.0, is little more than an empty gem that points to Terrapin. It will also continue to work, but it’ll be a little noisy about telling you it’s deprecated. It should work just as fine as the previous version (0.5.8) did, plus it will allow an easy upgrade path: Replace Cocaine constants with Terrapin and you’re done.