OK, this is very strange.
I'm guessing it's (somehow) gem-related.
Yesterday I installed Rails on a remote server -- but then
changed my mind and didn't use it there, and installed it
elsewhere.
So anyway: It brought over a few dependencies like ActiveRecord.
I have a plain old CGI (yeah, call me a Luddite) which suddenly
quit working yesterday. It *doesn't* use AR or anything, but
it does use DBM and YAML. It was crashing while trying to store
a yaml'd string in the dbm. (I've done some playing with YAML,
and I have #load aliased to #old_load.)
Oddly, it seemed to be using yaml.rb instead of the extension
(syck?).
On the theory that nothing happens without a reason (yeah, call
me optimistic) -- I looked for files named "*yaml*" and found
a yaml_wrapper.rb under /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.6.0/lib/active_record/wrappers/
Uninstalling AR, or even just moving that one file, fixes my
crash.
And yet David assures me this is "old code, not loaded anywhere."
Sure enough, I don't find any requires of it with grep.
But the fact remains: If that file is there, my app crashes. If it
isn't, it doesn't.
Chad, Jim, if you want more info, just ask...
Hal