From: Bret Pettichord <bret@...>
Date: 2005-09-30T05:32:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Gems undermine unit testing

At 06:13 AM 9/28/2005, Jim Weirich wrote:
>Then I am mystified.  *Something* is causing the gem to be loaded.  The fact
>that the tests run correctly without the gem installed indicate the it is not
>activated by need (since obviously you don't need it), nor by require_gem.

I was using breakpoint to try and debug this situation, but i now think 
that it may have had side effects itself that confused me more.

I did
   require 'breakpoint'; breakpoint

In my script, and then from irb, checked $LOAD_PATH. That was when i saw 
that the directory to the watir gem library preceeded the 'current 
directory' that i had prepended to it.

I'm now wondering whether i in fact was getting the right watir library 
through require because the load path didn't get changed until later. But 
if this is true, then if i had required a gem library before the watir 
require, i would not have loaded the one i wanted.

It seems that the gem mechanism changes the load path to speed up further 
requires. But i am wondering if it modifies it more drastically than it 
needs to. If i am require'ing 'breakpoint', the paths to other gem 
libraries should not be showing up on the load path.

This is all somewhat speculative, because while i was trying to track this 
down, i started getting a different version of breakpoint than i intended. 
There apparently is a 'breakpoint' library in one of the rails gems and it 
was being loaded instead and it was redefining the module class in a way 
that made the modules in my code break. I ended up uninstalling a dozen 
gems that i had installed last week because i knew i was running into 
interaction problems and i needed to simplify my situation.

Bret

_____________________
  Bret Pettichord
  www.pettichord.com