I'm developing on edge, and my app doesnt currently require ActionMailer or ActiveResource, so I disabled them in RAILS_ROOT/config/environment.rb
config.frameworks -= [ :active_resource, :action_mailer ]
I'm on edge rails commit # 3fd9036fc554979e951422a79f0f77f061112bdc
I then typed rake spec and got the following stacktrace: http://pastie.org/240477.
(I know some if you might think this could be an rspec problem, but i'm not so sure. Hear me out a little bit more..)
I opened up vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb and looked at load_view_paths on line 342.
I changed line 344 from
ActionMailer::Base.template_root.load
to
ActionMailer::Base.template_root.load if configuration.frameworks.include?(:action_mailer)
and my problem went away.
This just seems like a common sense fix for those of us on edge, or on vendor rails.