I loves me some RSpec, but I’ve had this consistent problem on my last two projects when RSpec and Rcov are run together: Sometimes you get Seg Faults. In a previous post I talked about my solution to this (redefining the new method on ActiveRecord objects), but it was a hacky solution and I’m glad to say that it’s out of the code base as of today. On a hunch this weekend I installed RSpec 0.8.2 (we had been using 0.7.5.1), took out my super-fun hacktacular solution from a spec and it ran fine.

But why?

Looking through RSpec’s list of bugs fixed I didn’t see any reference to the bug I logged a few months ago (I didn’t really expect too – they were never able to reproduce it) but I do have any idea. David Chelimsky (lead dev of RSpec) had been telling me for awhile about how he was going to change RSpec to stop using method_missing on object because when Rails takes it for its own purposes, then RSpec has to some hacky things to steal it back (David wrote about it in “rspec.should use_a_little_less_magic“and so did I in “Battle of the method_missings”). Since the removal of that code was the big change between 0.7.5.1 and 0.8.2, I’m gonna guess that it was the problem.