Fixing use of I18n.t during asset precompilation on Heroku

assets.rake

# Rake task overriding, with original task calling. Found here:
#
# http://metaskills.net/2010/05/26/the-alias_method_chain-of-rake-override-rake-task/

Rake::TaskManager.class_eval do
  def alias_task(fq_name)
    new_name = "#{fq_name}:original"
    @tasks[new_name] = @tasks.delete(fq_name)
  end
end

def alias_task(fq_name)
  Rake.application.alias_task(fq_name)
end

def override_task(*args, &block)
  name, params, deps = Rake.application.resolve_args(args.dup)
  fq_name = Rake.application.instance_variable_get(:@scope).dup.push(name).join(':')
  alias_task(fq_name)
  Rake::Task.define_task(*args, &block)
end

# Heroku requires that config.assets.initialize_on_precompile be set to false, which 
# means you can't use I18n.t translations in your precompiled assets. Overriding the
# assets:precompile task to get the config/locales/*.yml files back on the I18n load 
# path fixes this.

namespace :assets do
  desc "Replay application events to reconstruct application state"
  override_task :precompile do
    puts "*** Running overloaded assets:precompile! ***"
    I18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('config', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}').to_s]
    Rake::Task["assets:precompile:original"].execute
  end
end

Do you know if this works for non-en locales? I added I18n.default_locale = :"pt-BR" just below the load_path line and it keeps trying to use the en locale (and since I don't have the strings in en, it outputs the missing translation message).

On another note, do you really need to alias the task? I first thought about adding a task dependency to the assets:precompile task in which it sets the load_path:

task :configure_i18n do
  # I18n.load_path ...
end

Rake::Task["assets:precompile"].enhance [:configure_i18n]

If I puts inside the :configure_i18n task and call rake assets:precompile it outputs so it's definitely being called. Since your (that blog's) method is just wrapping the original task, it seems to be the same thing. enhanceing is a default supported way to do it for Rake, though.