Issue #19985 has been updated by martinemde (Martin Emde). It seems like you’re suggesting that required features don’t use a path name based hierarchy for organization. I’m guessing you’re thinking of pathnames as something strictly tied to the filesystem, but Pathname is a useful class for manipulating any string that follows the slash separated, tree based navigation. We usually think of these as files on a file system, but ruby features are organized this way too and even if we broke them free of the file system, we’d still use this hierarchy. This is how you require specific subsets of features from Active Support, or how you require a feature that is not in load path by referring to where it can be found with relative pathname conventions that translate to filesystem locations. Paths, and therefore Pathnames, show how to get somewhere. You could use them for url paths, cache keys, filesystems or ruby features. The fact is that we use paths for ruby features. That string, no matter what you call it, is a path even if it is not a strict filesystem filename. Almost everyone thinks it’s a duck (pathname) and rubygems has been accepting ducks for years for 99% of Rubyists. In this case things that make it unique are so slight that most people are more confused that it doesn’t work than enlightened when they learn it’s not supposed to work (for some reason). This is not following the principal of least surprise. ---------------------------------------- Feature #19985: Support `Pathname` for `require` https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19985#change-105155 * Author: vo.x (Vit Ondruch) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal ---------------------------------------- It seems that RubyGems / Bundler `require` method overrides of accept `Pathname` as and argument ~~~ $ ruby -rpathname -e ' pa = Pathname.new("test") require pa ' <internal:/usr/share/rubygems/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:85:in `require': cannot load such file -- test (LoadError) from <internal:/usr/share/rubygems/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:85:in `require' from -e:3:in `<main>' ~~~ while plain Ruby require does not: ~~~ $ ruby --disable-gems -rpathname -e ' pa = Pathname.new("test") require pa ' -e:3:in `require': no implicit conversion of Pathname into String (TypeError) from -e:3:in `<main>' ~~~ This inconsistency is surprising. It seems that RubyGems / Bundler developers think [1] that Ruby `require` should also accept `Pathname`. ~~~ $ ruby -v ruby 3.2.2 (2023-03-30 revision e51014f9c0) [x86_64-linux] ~~~ [1]: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/pull/7128 -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/