Hello everyone!
This is Vipul from Rainy Pune ☔ , cozying up with a ☕, bringing you a recap of the changes  that made it to Rails this week.
If you too want to contribute to Rails, head over to the issues to help us out!

Do not generate default alt text in image tags

Previously Rails auto-generated alt text for an image from the file name if it was not provided with an image_tag. This generation could be distracting and fatiguing for screen reader users if not considered properly.

After this change, if authors leave images without alt text, Rails will not pre fill it anymore, leaving screen readers to prompt authors to fix the issue.

Prevent extra “SET time zone” in configure_connection

Previously Rails would end up setting database connection timezone twice, once if passed via configuration in configure_connection and secondly while setting default timezone.

This change removes setting timezone on database twice if timezone is already passed via configuration variables.

Add TransactionTimeout for MySQL error code 1205

This PR adds TransactionTimeout error to the MySQL adapter, which handles the error:
Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction (MySQL error 1205)

Encode Content-Disposition filenames according to RFC 2231 in Active Storage

Before this change, urls for files with non-english names would create issues in Active Storage.

This change fixes encoding Content-Disposition for filenames to RFC 2231, to fix this issue.

Cookie expiry enforced server-side for signed/encrypted cookies

For signed/encrypted cookies with ``:expires` like

cookies.signed[:user_name] = { value: "bob", expires: 2.hours }

Rails now embeds the expiry within the written cookie payload. This way Rails isn’t reliant on clients to honor the expiry, but can verify it independently server-side.

Make restart and dev:cache tasks work when customizing pid file path

Previously rails dev:cache failed to restart the Rails server when it was started with a custom pid file path.
With this change, restart no longer fails for a custom pid file and successfully restarts Rails server on dev:cache changes.

Fix can't modify frozen String error in display_image

This change does a quick fix for an error with display_image in System tests, which is used for screenshots, that used to raise an error when trying to modify a frozen string.

Fixes :inverse_of association option not working with eager_loading

Previously calling an eager_load on :inverse_of association failed. This was a regression from Rails 5.1 release. 

This change, fixes the regression.

That’s all for this week! Feel free to check the full list of commits if you are interested. Until next week!