From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2007-03-30T23:54:35+09:00
Subject: Re: required module automatically including, except in Debian

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Phil Darnowsky wrote:

> Dear everyone,
>
> I've recently joined a project which has some code analagous to this:
>
> included.rb:
>
> OUTER_CONST = 'foo'
> module Included
>  INNER_CONST = 42
> end
>
>
>
> includer.rb:
>
> require 'included'
> puts OUTER_CONST      # => foo
> puts INNER_CONST      # => 42 (but why does this work?)
>
>
> Now, you'll notice that includer.rb does require included, but never
> actually includes it--yet in this setup, everyone swears up and down,
> with logs to back it up, that it works.  Before I came on, it was a
> mixed Gentoo Linux/OS X/FreeBSD development environment, and apparently
> it worked in all three of these OSes, but not in the new Debian box I
> set up.
>
> I've been back and forth through the Pickaxe book and the Web trying to
> find out what might make these three environments behave this way, but
> not Debian.  The Debian box and FreeBSD are both running Ruby 1.8.5, the
> others I don't have access to at the moment.  The Gentoo machine does
> have their special -rauto_gem in RUBYOPT, but when I tried replicating
> auto_gem.rb on the Debian box it didn't help--included.rb isn't a gem
> anyhow.
>
> I am truly stumped, and I'm not alone in this.  Anyone have any
> thoughts? Thanks if you do!

grep the source for 'const_missing'.  someone may have done something strange
with it.  another thing is that require itself may have been overriden.

-a
-- 
be kind whenever possible... it is always possible.
- the dalai lama