[ruby-core:31076] Re: [Bug #3140] gem activation has changed between 1.8 and 1.9

On 6 Jul 2010, at 10:56, Run Paint Run Run wrote:

> Issue #3140 has been updated by Run Paint Run Run.
> 
> 
>> @runpaint I don't think it does, since comment 17 does a simple require without requiring
>> rubygems or using the #gem command.
> 
> I misspoke. I meant that if it is preceded with `require 'rubygems'` it works as it should. IOW, the 1.8, and arguably correct, behaviour is available by explicitly requiring 'rubygems', meaning that scripts that work under 1.8 will behave in the same fashion under 1.9. Under 1.9, fans of brevity can omit `require 'rubygems'` if willing to accept the altered semantics. This is an uneasy compromise from any angle, but does at least retain backward compatibility.

I don't agree, this is forcing people to add require 'rubygems' to their code, which is unacceptable as well. Introducing broken semantics into the core language will add support load to rubygems, bundler, debian, rails, and a bunch of other places. This is totally unfair in light of it basically being a poor approach at optimisation-by-replacement rather than optimisation by profiling and fixing the core problems. See my optimisations of rubygems (which at the moment the most significant impact is a hack to allow not loading plugins). There is more than can be done in this direction, and in my opinion gem_prelude should never have been created instead of doing these optimisations on core. To completely violate semantics and pass issues frequently down to users, and to suggest that they should then fix these issues by invoking bad practices is totally ridiculous, I really can't bring myself to respond to this kind of comment more lightly.

The situation is unacceptable, and its continuation is irresponsible.

> ----------------------------------------
> http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/3140
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> http://redmine.ruby-lang.org
>