While using `require_dependency` to load original Consul Democracy code
from custom code works with the classic autoloader, this method was
never meant to be used this way. With zeitwerk, the code (apparently)
works in the test, development and production environments, but there's
one important gotcha: changing any `.rb` file in development will
require restarting the rails server since the application will crash
when reloading.
Quoting zeitwerk's author Xavier Noria, whom we've contacted while
looking for a solution:
> With the classic autoloader, when the Setting constant is autoloaded,
> the autoloader searched the autoload paths, found setting.rb in
> app/models/custom, and loaded it. With zeitwerk, the autoloader scans
> the folders in order and defines an autoload (Module#autoload) in
> Object so Ruby autoloads Setting with app/models/custom/settings.rb.
> Later, when app/models/setting.rb is found, it's ignored since there's
> already an autoload for Setting.
>
> That means the first file is managed by the autoloaders, while the
> second is not.
>
> So require_dependency worked, but it was pure luck, since the purpose
> of require_dependency is forcing the load of files managed by the
> autoloaders and, as we've seen, app/models/settings.rb isn't one of
> them.
>
> With your current pattern for custom files, the best solution is using
> Kernel#load.
So we're using `load` instead of `require_dependency`. Note that, with
`load`, we need to add the `.rb` extension to the required file, and we
no longer have to convert the Pathname to a string with `to_s`.
Many CONSUL installations struggle when trying to define their own
settings or trying to overwrite the default ones. Particularly because
tests assume the default settings are used, so changing them breaks the
test suite in many cases.
So we're adding a custom setting model in order to make it easier to
change the default settings and define new ones, while making sure doing
so won't break the tests.
While these settings can also be changed by administrators, defining
custom settings in the code is useful in come cases. For example, when
certain default settings have been decided while using staging
environments and there's interest in using the same settings on
production, when institutions would like to use the same custom settings
across several CONSUL installations, or (when we implement multitenancy)
when defining the same default settings for each new tenant.
