Contents

You're probably wondering why this directory is here. If a user does not have
a previous release of watir in their local gem repository, it doesn't really
matter. If, however, they have a previous watir installation then we could
get into an issue that would prevent this code from running.

When you require 'watir', ruby looks through each directory to see if a
lib/watir.rb exists *independent* of the name of the gem. Watir is a pretty
old project and at the point it was supporting firefox, safari and ie, a new
gem was created to handle common code. This was the commonwatir gem and it had
a lib/watir.rb which would load watir (not from the watir gem).

So now we're moving to watir being the gem with the lib/watir.rb and we want to
retain the ability to require 'watir'. If a user has an old watir build then
ruby will find the older commonwatir first and run it from
commonwatir/lib/watir.rb instead of the new location watir/lib/watir.rb. That
results in the older version of watir loading even though a newer gem is
installed.

To make sure this doesn't happen we release a new commonwatir gem with a higher
version number so it gets picked up instead of the older version. The watir.rb
in commonwatir just delegates to watir/loader.rb

Version data entries

2 entries across 2 versions & 1 rubygems

Version	Path
commonwatir-4.0.0	README
commonwatir-3.0.0	README