Hi,

When debugging why Rubinius can't be build with 1.9 now, I've encountered the following issue. I'm wondering whether this has been an explicit change from 1.8 to 1.9 or that it happened without this side-effect during some refactor. 

The situation is as followed:

$LOAD_PATH=['dir1, 'dir2'] with these directories containing the following files:

dir1
  lib1.so
dir2
  lib1.rb

Then running the following ruby code:

require 'lib1'

In 1.8, the lib1 file that gets loaded depend on the order in $LOAD_PATH which is what I would expect. So in this situation, lib1.so is loaded since that is present in the first directory in the load path. If the $LOAD_PATH is reversed, lib1.rb is loaded. 

In 1.9 however, something else happens. When looking at the code of require, I found that it first looks in each of the directories in the $LOAD_PATH for a .rb file, and then for a .so file in each directory. So in this case, you end up with lib1.rb being loaded, irrespective of the order in $LOAD_PATH. To me this is very unexpected and also has the result that as an end-user I have no control over what file is loaded, except for explicitly adding the extension, which should not be necessary imho. 

Is this change an intended behavior change in 1.9?

-- 
Regards,