Change inflector to one that doesn't monkey patch

[cllns]

I'd like to add Skylight to my Hanami project, but it depends on ActiveSupport. I see that someone else suggested removing this dependency but the proposal wasn't accepted.

In general, I'm really hesitant to pull ActiveSupport into my project, since it's very easy to accidentally introduce monkey-patched method calls. I really like Skylight so this is a huge bummer for me, but the risk of accidentally adding a monkey patch is too high for me.

@wagenet said:

it isn't our intent to use the extensions. If you notice that we're causing them to be used anywhere, please let me know.

I'm not sure where it's happening, but there's a core extension (monkey patch) being used, via ActiveSupport's Inflector.

Without skylight in my Gemfile, "dog".pluralize rightly raises a NoMethodError.
With skylight in my Gemfile, "dog".pluralize returns "dogs".

A good, simple, and maintained, non-core extension library for inflections is dry-inflector.

[zvkemp]

Thanks for the report, @cllns . Unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce the effect you described in a new Hanami project (adding skylight did not cause string extensions to load). Could you please provide more information about what versions of Hanami and Skylight you are using, or a reproducible scenario that we could investigate?

[cllns]

@zvkemp Thanks for the quick response.

What a doozy! Took me a couple hours but I realized it was actually a bug with how a dependency of a dependency of hanami-model handles inflections: by automatically trying to require ActiveSupport::Inflector as a back-end for the table name inflections. The reason it doesn't show up in a new app is that there are no models or other DB code, so that code never gets executed. (See the reference issue above for details, if you're interested)

Closing this since it's not a bug with skylight-ruby. I'm still super skeptical of adding activesupport as a transitive dependency though. (Now more than ever, even!)

[wagenet]

@cllns My understanding is that requiring ActiveSupport shouldn't automatically do any monkey-patching. You have to explicitly require certain files for that to happen. Am I mistaken?

[cllns]

@wagenet Yup! The issue is that a transitive dependency was requiring ActiveSupport::Inflector because it was available.

[wagenet]

@cllns got it. Thanks for clarifying.