From: Brian Ford <brixen@...>
Date: 2008-06-18T00:32:30+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:17303] Re: Major change in 1.8.6: convert_type now uses private conversion 	methods too

Hi all,

On Jun 16, 8:00�pm, Urabe Shyouhei <shyou...@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> Vladimir Sizikov wrote:
> > I"m trying to understand why it was needed, and was it really needed
> > that bad to add to 1.8.6 series?
>
> It was introduced to fix ruby-bugs #19377http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&group_id=426&atid=...

My 2 cents on this: The #respond_to? method allows you (the
programmer) to optionally search for private methods (which you can
then call with #send). But the decision to search for private methods
should always be in the hands of the programmer. The language and libs
should never make this decision for you. If I choose to make methods
"private" in my code, I expect other code to respect that if it wants
to play nicely. I *never* expect the system to ignore my intentions in
some ad hoc manner.

Also, as a general principle, a bug fix should touch only the code and
functionality centered around the bug. This change affects code and
functionality that is very distant from the problem.

I am strongly in favor of reverting this change and using a fix that
only focuses on Marshall. If #_load and #_dump need to be public
instead, that would make a lot more sense to me.