Rails core - Jul 2009 - 2.3.3 bug in chained named scopes. Lambdas executing inside of the scope of the parent scopes.

In the process of upgrading from 2.2 to 2.3.3 we''ve come across a
major change in named_scopes that seems to be a bug.  The patch can be
found here:
https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1267-methods-invoked-within-named_scope-procs-should-respect-the-scope-stack
and it does do what it says, but we think that what it does is wrong.
It leads to named_scopes that are order dependent, and queries inside
of lambdas do not behave as you would expect.

Given a User class with a ''friends'' association (pointing at
other
Users) with the following named_scopes:

named_scope :named_bob, {
  :conditions => {:name => ''bob''}
}

named_scope :second_degree_friends, lambda{|user|
  user_friends = user.friends
  second_degree_friend_ids = user_friends.collect{|u| u.friend_ids}
  {
    :conditions => {:id => second_degree_friend_ids.flatten}
  }
}

User.named_bob.second_degree_friends(user_sam)
User.second_degree_friends(user_sam).named_bob

So one of these queries will only pull user_sam''s friends named
''bob''
and then see if any of them have friends named ''bob'' which is
not what
I want.  The other one will work as expected where it finds all of
user_sam''s second degree friends named bob.