This is a bug I ran into too. It's caused because Rsepc is actually putting it's debugger method in Object, instead of Kernel. (and Object instance methods take precedence over Kernel ones).

This patch resolves the issue for me:

http://github.com/timcharper/rspec-core/commit/c476e088ebabb4a89c8566be4fa07849d88271ac

Merged: http://github.com/rspec/rspec-core/commit/5443fa859bc1912f9c1fcb377d3da51354c2a11c

Turns out that didn't really solve the problem, but this did: http://github.com/rspec/rspec-core/commit/99727ba70461ee921fbdff5b84e514a6dca83635

Weird.. the patch certainly solved the problem for me.

Tim - the experience I had was that when I had a debugger statement but did not include the -d flag, I got an undefined method error on debugger. This is because ruby-debug gets required after the kernel extensions do, so at the time the kernel extensions get loaded, the unless defined? test fails.

Make sense?

What you say makes sense, but why it didn't work doesn't.

I used the debugger w/out the -d flag. I have a textmate snippet that does "require 'ruby-debug'; debugger"... and it worked perfectly fine.

But, at any rate, I trust your sanity, and therefore your claim that it was still broken. Thank you very much for your work on RSpec!

I'm guessing the textmate snippet loaded ruby-debug before rspec loaded, so what you describe makes sense. Make sense?

Unlikely, I stuck it right in the middle of an example.

Not sure what's different in our environments but it works for me now as I expect and it didn't before. Can you do me a favor and pull the latest, build the gem and make sure it's working as you expect?

Works just great here! Thank you.

Great. Thanks Tim.

also, if you are using bundler, make sure you have included the 'ruby-debugger19' under test env in your Gemfile, or it won't be included by rspec -d.