Why should Hashie alwasy take a back seat? about hashie

[mbleigh]

The code that multiple libraries have to stringify keys should be more or less identical from an output perspective, but this is being a "better library citizen" by making sure that Hashie works unobtrusively in any environment. People don't always have choice over when an extension is loaded (ActiveSupport in Rails, for instance, is loaded before any GemPlugins) and I don't think the tradeoff is worth the risk.

Then maybe ActiveSupport is not being the "better library citizen" ;-) But I think that gets to the heart of it, you don't want to step on ActiveSupport's toes. With regards to other libs it doesn't work out any better, b/c if they do the same as you then it will be who ever loads their library first (instead of last), and if they don't do the same Hashie always gets knocked out. Because one library might do it one way and another another, we never know which we will get.