The latest changesets to Ruby 1.9.2 no longer make the current directory . part of your LOAD_PATH. I have a non-trivial number of Rakefiles that assume that . is part of the LOAD_PATH, so this broke them. Was there a particular justification for doing this?
As for a fix, adding $: << "." everywhere works, but seems incredibly hacky and I don't want to do that. What's the preferred way to make my Rakefiles 1.9.2+ compatible?
it was deemed a "security" risk
You can get around it by using full paths or relative paths or doing require './filename' (ironically). GL.
There's two reasons:
Both are based on the same underlying principle: in general, you simply cannot know what the current directory is, when your code is run. Which means that, when you require a file and depend on it being in the current directory, you have no way of controlling whether that file will even be there, or whether it is the file that you actually expect to be there.
'.' in your path has long been considered a bad thing in the Unix world (see, for example, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/section-13.html). I assume the Ruby folks have been persuaded of the wisdom of not doing that.
But now non of examples from common libraries works, like gtk examples or qt samples.
e.g. Main.rb from gtk-demo uses external modules/files for all the examples like application.rb, to use them you need to change all the references in the code to './filename.rb'... I think this is annoying but ... (maybe a little of security worth the hundreds of lines we will need to change)
just my 2 cents!!