From: Rob Sanheim <rsanheim@...>
Date: 2007-12-17T10:37:44+09:00
Subject: Re: magic / counter-magic? (detect loading file?)

On Dec 16, 2007 2:52 PM, Giles Bowkett <gilesb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's something that's puzzling me.
>
> Somewhere inside Rails is something which loads your .irbrc under some
> circumstances. It means that if you have a gem which adds a lot of
> methods to Object and which is required by people in their .irbrcs,
> sooner or later, your methods on Object are going to collide with
> Rails' methods on *anything*. I have such a gem, Utility Belt, and
> this happened to somebody who installed it. It's going to happen to a
> lot of people, in fact, because the method in question was named
> "edit," which practically every Rails app uses.
>
> I took a look around the Rails file-loading process and it looked
> pretty involved. I know the problem comes from
> ActiveSupport::Dependencies but that's about it. I'd like to find and
> fix the bug in Rails but I just don't have time. What I want to do
> instead is set up Utility Belt to recognize when it's being called
> from Rails and then have it de-borkify the situation. All I really
> need to accomplish that is code which can recognize where it's being
> called or loaded from. I know such code, and idioms for using it,
> exist, but I'm not sure what they are. Is it just a matter of grepping
> against __FILE__? How does my gem determine who it's being loaded by
> and send them away if they don't need to be loading it?

I have utility_belt 1.0.5, rails 2.0.1, and an app with controllers
with edit actions.  None of them have shown this bug.  How are you
sure its really a rails bug, and not just some weird combination of
plugins/gems, utility_belt, _and_ rails that causes the error to show
on a few unlucky folks apps?

- Rob