Reloading Ruby Classes in Rails

I ran across a bug in Date::Format today, and after spending a few hours hacking away at a fix (the date/format.rb code is *uuuuugly* and *sloooow*...someone should really rewrite that. Better yet, rewrite it in C), I thought I'd submit a patch. So I grabbed the ruby_1_8 branch and lo and behold, my issue had already been fixed!

So the question now was how to monkeypatch the entire Date::Format module? Simply require-ing it as a plugin doesn't work, since Date::Format is already loaded at that point. The trick then is to use load instead of require.

First, I tried this:

load 'date/format.rb'

(note: load needs the actual filename; it doesn't have the magic that require does) but that gave me an error:

in `load': wrong number of arguments (1 for 0) (ArgumentError)

Turns out Rails::Plugin::Loader defines its own load, so:

Kernel::load 'date/format.rb'

et voila!