order is reversed

This code is not working because of the reason mentioned here https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/5424-merging-... .

However I have a larger question about the usage of with_scope and the order.

    Car.send(:with_scope, :find => { :order => 'id DESC' }) do
      Car.find(:all, :order => 'name asc')
    end

    # existing code is producing
    #=> SELECT "cars".* FROM "cars" ORDER BY name asc, id DESC

Since order is always concatenated, I would expect the final query to have order 'id desc, name asc'. However the current code produces the sql which has order 'name asc, id desc'.

It means that if I have deeply nested with_scope then current code will give precedence to the innermost order. However I would expect order from the outermost with_scope to have precedence.

Any reason why the innermost code will have priority over outermost when it comes to building order in with_scope?

# Following code has been tested with rails 2.3.8
#
# In rails 2.3.8 this is what's happening
# 
# * find has the highest priority. order defined in find wins all the time
# * named_scope comes second. order defined in named_scope wins over order defined in default_scope
# * default_scope has lowest priority.
#

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  named_scope :order_by_name, :order => 'name desc'

  def self.lab
    User.order_by_name.find(:all, :order => 'id desc')  
    #=> SELECT * FROM "users" ORDER BY id desc, name desc
  end
end


class BigUser < User

  default_scope :order => 'id desc'

  def self.lab

    BigUser.order_by_name.find(:all, :order => 'name')
    #=> SELECT * FROM "users" ORDER BY name, name desc
    
    BigUser.order_by_name
    #=> SELECT * FROM "users" ORDER BY name desc
  end

end

Current code in rails 3 master is backward compatible.

However I feel the rules are too vague in 2.3.x. I like the rules defined in rails3 where order is always concatenated. I fully understand that fixing ticket like this one will break backward compatibility.

master: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/91fec0d24d50d3b3e90c48b2501ca9...
3-0-stable: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/1c7a7545eb108b297252cf8d683501...