play-nice.rb

# This is a useful little pattern for working with gems without
# explicitly requiring rubygems in your code.
#
# The approach taken is to require a library and catch any LoadError
# that might get thrown. In the rescue clause we require rubygems.
#
# The require method is nice in that it will return true if the code
# was loaded, and it returns false if the code was _already_ loaded.
# If the require of rubygems returns true, we will retry our original
# require. It will either succeed this time (since we now have rubygems
# loaded) or it will raise another LoadError. Now we raise the error
# again since rubygems was already required.

begin
  require 'logging'
rescue LoadError
  retry if require 'rubygems'
  raise
end

# EOF