The Rails Way

This is just a remark. It turns out that script/server, script/runner, and script/console load first boot.rb, and then environment.rb.

I think there's redundancy there and they could just load environment.rb directly, but that's the way they are written. Since boot.rb does nothing if it was already run, the load in environment.rb of boot.rb just returns, and then the initializer block computes load_paths again.

So if you launch the server and Rails is not under vendor the gem version, if any, is extracted with a regexp because environment.rb has not yet been loaded.

The regexp is much robust in 2.0 than in previous versions, it allows some optional whitespace, single and double quotes, and gems version operators.

boot.rb has been vastly cleaned as well, it was a script before, and now it is very structured and clear.