[legedemon]

https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia is enough to solve problems at very large scales.

There is nothing about Rails or MVC preventing someone from doing this. This is a very common design principle for all kind of ERP and BPM systems: don't ever delete anything.

[berkes]

First: soft-delete really doesn't need a library. Paranoia is nice, but almost all of the code and complexity in that gem is to support multiple versions of rails and to let you configure that gem.

DIY in this case really is very simple. And far more flexible, performant even, and future-proof.

(I've worked on a project where two full-time devs spent days upgrading this gem; this is over 6 years ago). And a few months ago, I worked on a project where they had more code to configure, patch and work around paranoia, than any DIY ever did. My even simpler DIY version not only used 50% of the code we had to override the gem before, it allowed for some custom work that we could not do before.

And no: even DIY ain't as simple as you make it seem. Practical issue, that I encountered last year even, was where their "soft delete" was making state-machines very tough. Because in a FSM, "deleted" wants to be state, like anything else. But the "generic soft-delete" conflicts with that. So the project had both. And some fugly glue-code to sync between the FSM and the soft-delete and vice-versa. No suprise that this broke occasionally, making data re-available that people thought gone.