Forum: Ruby-core [ruby-trunk - Bug #7716][Open] Readdressing Autoload

Issue #7716 has been reported by trans (Thomas Sawyer).

----------------------------------------
Bug #7716: Readdressing Autoload
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7716

Author: trans (Thomas Sawyer)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee:
Category: core
Target version: next minor
ruby -v: ruby 2.0.0dev (2013-01-18 trunk 38877) [x86_64-linux]


=begin
It has been known for a long time that Autoload does not utilize the 
normal require method, and thus is unaffected when require is 
overridden. This makes it impossible to fully implement a custom load 
system. Obviously, customizing the load system is a fairly rare usecase 
and thus a low priority. But it can and does occur. The most notable 
example is RubyGems itself. Without the ability to customize the load 
system, RubyGems would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, 
to create. It can be thankful that its particular design does not suffer 
greatly from the "autoload hole", nonetheless it does have a reported 
bug b/c of it, #4233. I too have a custom load system that I have been 
using in a development setting for many years. I use it to simplify 
vendoring between dependent projects. I would have liked to made public 
releases of the project, but the autoload issue has always been too much 
of a show-stopper to make it generally usable.

This issue with autoload has been reported since at least as far back as 
October 2007. That's over 5 years ago. Over these years, I have asked 
many times that this issue be addressed and why I needed it addressed. 
It has been very frustrating to watch this issue languish, year after 
year, going unresolved. I understand low priority issues, but 5 years!? 
Finally, just ((*over a year ago*)) Matz declared that "autoload will be 
dead" in issue #5653. "Well", I thought at the time, "that's one way to 
fix it". While I still wished autoload would actually be fixed, at least 
I could rest assured that in due course the problem would dissipate as 
new releases of projects are made deprecating their use of autoload.

In the last few days, I have asked a number of notable projects, 
including Bundler and RubyGems (a standard library mind you!) when we 
might expect autoload to be removed from their code. After all it's 
already been over a year since Matz' declaration. But, in all cases, 
they reported that they had no intentions of removing autoload in the 
foreseeable future. So much for strong discouragements from our 
benevolent dictator.

This week I revisited my custom load manager and re-factored the code a 
great deal. I'm very happy with the new code and think that it's about 
as good as it's going to get (minor improvements aside). I suppose I can 
at least be happy that I've had all this time to think about and improve 
my code. That's good. But at this point I'd would really like to release 
it all proper-like.

So... since this autoload issue was obviously still not going anywhere, 
I took it upon myself to fix. Mind you, I am not a C programmer and this 
is basically right at the limits of my ability to do anything with 
Ruby's C code. But, I was able to wrangle out how to make a fix and now 
offer it up here with an enclosed patch. The patch simply adds a Kernel 
singleton method called #require_autoload which can be overridden to 
customize it's operation. The patch includes a test to ensure it works. 
Perhaps there is some preference to handle this differenetly. That's 
fine, please adjust it as seen fit. But please *do something*! This 
issue has gone unaddressed long enough. And really, it is only a small 
bit of code. I ask, and pray, we will see this fix make it into the next 
release of 2.0 and back-ported tho 1.9. Please.
=end

Issue #7716 has been updated by trans (Thomas Sawyer).


Priority: High
----------------------------------------
Bug #7716: Readdressing Autoload
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7716#change-35635

Author: trans (Thomas Sawyer)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee:
Category: core
Target version: next minor
ruby -v: ruby 2.0.0dev (2013-01-18 trunk 38877) [x86_64-linux]


=begin
It has been known for a long time that Autoload does not utilize the 
normal require method, and thus is unaffected when require is 
overridden. This makes it impossible to fully implement a custom load 
system. Obviously, customizing the load system is a fairly rare usecase 
and thus a low priority. But it can and does occur. The most notable 
example is RubyGems itself. Without the ability to customize the load 
system, RubyGems would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, 
to create. It can be thankful that its particular design does not suffer 
greatly from the "autoload hole", nonetheless it does have a reported 
bug b/c of it, #4233. I too have a custom load system that I have been 
using in a development setting for many years. I use it to simplify 
vendoring between dependent projects. I would have liked to made public 
releases of the project, but the autoload issue has always been too much 
of a show-stopper to make it generally usable.

This issue with autoload has been reported since at least as far back as 
October 2007. That's over 5 years ago. Over these years, I have asked 
many times that this issue be addressed and why I needed it addressed. 
It has been very frustrating to watch this issue languish, year after 
year, going unresolved. I understand low priority issues, but 5 years!? 
Finally, just ((*over a year ago*)) Matz declared that "autoload will be 
dead" in issue #5653. "Well", I thought at the time, "that's one way to 
fix it". While I still wished autoload would actually be fixed, at least 
I could rest assured that in due course the problem would dissipate as 
new releases of projects are made deprecating their use of autoload.

In the last few days, I have asked a number of notable projects, 
including Bundler and RubyGems (a standard library mind you!) when we 
might expect autoload to be removed from their code. After all it's 
already been over a year since Matz' declaration. But, in all cases, 
they reported that they had no intentions of removing autoload in the 
foreseeable future. So much for strong discouragements from our 
benevolent dictator.

This week I revisited my custom load manager and re-factored the code a 
great deal. I'm very happy with the new code and think that it's about 
as good as it's going to get (minor improvements aside). I suppose I can 
at least be happy that I've had all this time to think about and improve 
my code. That's good. But at this point I'd would really like to release 
it all proper-like.

So... since this autoload issue was obviously still not going anywhere, 
I took it upon myself to fix. Mind you, I am not a C programmer and this 
is basically right at the limits of my ability to do anything with 
Ruby's C code. But, I was able to wrangle out how to make a fix and now 
offer it up here with an enclosed patch. The patch simply adds a Kernel 
singleton method called #require_autoload which can be overridden to 
customize it's operation. The patch includes a test to ensure it works. 
Perhaps there is some preference to handle this differenetly. That's 
fine, please adjust it as seen fit. But please *do something*! This 
issue has gone unaddressed long enough. And really, it is only a small 
bit of code. I ask, and pray, we will see this fix make it into the next 
release of 2.0 and back-ported tho 1.9. Please.
=end

Issue #7716 has been updated by ko1 (Koichi Sasada).

Assignee set to matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Target version changed from next minor to 2.1.0


----------------------------------------
Bug #7716: Readdressing Autoload
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7716#change-36463

Author: trans (Thomas Sawyer)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: 2.1.0
ruby -v: ruby 2.0.0dev (2013-01-18 trunk 38877) [x86_64-linux]


=begin
It has been known for a long time that Autoload does not utilize the 
normal require method, and thus is unaffected when require is 
overridden. This makes it impossible to fully implement a custom load 
system. Obviously, customizing the load system is a fairly rare usecase 
and thus a low priority. But it can and does occur. The most notable 
example is RubyGems itself. Without the ability to customize the load 
system, RubyGems would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, 
to create. It can be thankful that its particular design does not suffer 
greatly from the "autoload hole", nonetheless it does have a reported 
bug b/c of it, #4233. I too have a custom load system that I have been 
using in a development setting for many years. I use it to simplify 
vendoring between dependent projects. I would have liked to made public 
releases of the project, but the autoload issue has always been too much 
of a show-stopper to make it generally usable.

This issue with autoload has been reported since at least as far back as 
October 2007. That's over 5 years ago. Over these years, I have asked 
many times that this issue be addressed and why I needed it addressed. 
It has been very frustrating to watch this issue languish, year after 
year, going unresolved. I understand low priority issues, but 5 years!? 
Finally, just ((*over a year ago*)) Matz declared that "autoload will be 
dead" in issue #5653. "Well", I thought at the time, "that's one way to 
fix it". While I still wished autoload would actually be fixed, at least 
I could rest assured that in due course the problem would dissipate as 
new releases of projects are made deprecating their use of autoload.

In the last few days, I have asked a number of notable projects, 
including Bundler and RubyGems (a standard library mind you!) when we 
might expect autoload to be removed from their code. After all it's 
already been over a year since Matz' declaration. But, in all cases, 
they reported that they had no intentions of removing autoload in the 
foreseeable future. So much for strong discouragements from our 
benevolent dictator.

This week I revisited my custom load manager and re-factored the code a 
great deal. I'm very happy with the new code and think that it's about 
as good as it's going to get (minor improvements aside). I suppose I can 
at least be happy that I've had all this time to think about and improve 
my code. That's good. But at this point I'd would really like to release 
it all proper-like.

So... since this autoload issue was obviously still not going anywhere, 
I took it upon myself to fix. Mind you, I am not a C programmer and this 
is basically right at the limits of my ability to do anything with 
Ruby's C code. But, I was able to wrangle out how to make a fix and now 
offer it up here with an enclosed patch. The patch simply adds a Kernel 
singleton method called #require_autoload which can be overridden to 
customize it's operation. The patch includes a test to ensure it works. 
Perhaps there is some preference to handle this differenetly. That's 
fine, please adjust it as seen fit. But please *do something*! This 
issue has gone unaddressed long enough. And really, it is only a small 
bit of code. I ask, and pray, we will see this fix make it into the next 
release of 2.0 and back-ported tho 1.9. Please.
=end