I'm thinking maybe bundler could be hacked to load an installed gem, and then the same gem from a different (git repo or simple path) source at the same time under different namespaces. Doesn't sound like that's outside ruby's powers.

Being able to load gems into namespaces would rock! You'd never have to worry about incompatibilities between transient dependencies. I quite regularly get stuck with gems that have the same dependency but with different major versions. At the moment it means forking them, if they could each have their own namespace there'd be no problem.

That would be a cool solution too, but Bundler _really_ doesn't like it when you try to load multiple libraries with the same name so I'm not sure if this'll work. I will give it a shot soon, though. :)

I'm thinking:

    * require the broken RSpec
    * create a new module called Broken::RSpec
    * iterate through each member of the RSpec namespace (methods and variables), and copy it to the new module
    * unload RSpec
    * require the stable RSpec

I'm fairly sure that I have done all of these things separately (iterating/copying object members, unloading classes) in ruby before. I'm probably wrong though. Just thinking aloud.

When refinements come along in ruby 2.0 this will be easy.

EDIT: Or use ruby_parser to suck the AST out of the very broken rspec source files themselves and instance_eval it inside Broken::RSpec. Danger is my middle name.