rails makes it *impossible* to use any 3rd party json libs to generate pretty json

i'm not exactly sure what you mean. the 'patch' is just not to require 'json'. if one does that all the tests pass - of course.

this isn't something one can really fix with tests. should it submit a patch for each version of the json gem? for some a given test will fail and, for others, different tests will fail. not many, but 1 or 2 different ones. i'm pretty sure you aren't suggesting submitting a patch that test all permutations of gems one might possibly load - right?

more problematic is that, but requiring and alternate json gem the user is asserting that he wants different json generation/parsing - that's the whole point.

so, i guess i'm not following. there is no bug, just bad form on rails part which is really hard to fix on the user end: the code is marked with the comment 'hack' - which it is. the fix is simply to remove the hack.

the alternative is simple: rather than

1) requiring the json gem and then clobbering all it's code

do instead

2) do nothing. let the json gem maintainers provide bug fixes for rails compatibility

as it stands now it's just a massive hack (as the author states in the code). not only does it literally require a gem and then clobber it's method to death, but it introduces dependency issues since it does the hack outside of bundler and then loads the app inside of bundler - aka it can result in two json verions being loaded/blowing up.

all i'm saying is that it would be more clean to remove the code marked 'hack', which breaks no tests, and then to let actual bug reports come in (to rails or json.gem) than to make the person yelling foul provide alternatives when none are needed...

summary: do nothing.

it works fine, just slightly differently (as intended) when the json gem is loaded - user beware! actually, maybe that is the best approach: issue a warning after initialize if the json gem has been loaded... hrm.

ps. if you've ever worked on an extensive /api you'll see just how nice using JSON.pretty_generate in development actually is - it saves hours of debugging time. and, of course, it is way faster.