This appears to be a problem with Ruby's support for dynamically loading constants. From the group:
What basically happens apparently is that const_defined? cannot always "see" consts that are loaded dynamically if the const name can be resolved outside of the module. I had a similar problem with const_get, where it would return consts outside the module (which is why the Module bracket operator now uses eval).
This manifested itself by ignoring the default helper auto-load declaration in the MVC Layer. More precisely, it actually successfully loads the helpers/default.rb code if you provide it, but const_defined? incorrectly reports that :Default is still undefined, because it is somehow "shadowed" by Waves::Helpers::Default. Weird. Thus AutoCode goes ahead and auto-creates it.
If you use a name that is not shadowed, everything works fine. I have not tried to reproduce the problem on a more limited scale because I first wanted to see if the bug was still there in 1.87 or JRuby. Along the way, as I mentioned, RubyGems got confused and now claims it can't find any of my gems. Argh.
It turns out that the same behavior is exhibited in 1.8.7.
