Question

I’m developing a Gem which I think will be useful for more people than just me. One issue I’m facing is that I need to merge nested hashes. I found this useful Gist to accomplish that, but now I’m wondering if it’s okay to modify Hash# like this in a Gem?

I’m sure there’s a community “standard” or best practices that either accepts or declines this sort of code, so I’m turning to SO for guidance.

Thank you.

Answer 1

When in doubt, just subclass Hash and include the Module in your subclass. You should particularly do this, when you override methods or change the behavior dramatically.

But i don’t see why you shouldn’t just modify the Hash class. Rails, for example, extends Core classes rigorously and i’ve never heard someone complain. You might take a look at how Rails’ activesupport extends core classes:

https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext

Just make sure not to break existing behavior, so the users of your gem will not experience unwanted side-effects.