From: Tim Bates <tim@...>
Date: 2004-02-06T18:08:44+09:00
Subject: Removing methods from DRbObject

My application is using DRb extensively in support of its client-server 
model. Ideally I would like to have the remote objects in the client 
scripts appear exactly as they would if they were local. All my data 
objects include DRb::DRbUndumped so that only references are passed 
across the network, as the objects' code needs to run on the server 
(database access etc). Unfortunately, DRb::DRbObject defines a bunch of 
methods which it doesn't really use, such as ==, ===, <=> etc; but 
because it defines them, calls to them don't get proxied to the server.

The Criteria module has in it a neat little bit of code that looks like 
this:

   mask = ["__send__", "__id__", "inspect", "class", "is_a?", "dup",
           "instance_eval"];
   methods = instance_methods(true)
   methods = methods - mask

   methods.each do |m|
     undef_method(m)
   end

This removes all methods from the class except those in mask.
Something like this in DRb::DRBObject, with an appropriate mask list, 
would be really useful, because at the moment, if I have two DRbObjects 
which represent the same object on the remote side, the == method still 
returns false because of the way DRbObject defines == (the default way, 
if it's not exactly the same object they're not equal).

Therefore I have three questions:
1) Is this a reasonable change to make?
2) What is an appropriate mask list to use for DRb::DRbObject?
3) Can I get this change into the core library?

-- 
Tim Bates
tim@bates.id.au