Rails yanked out observers many many years ago, instead the functionality
was yanked out to a gem that is very lightly maintained.
For example: if we want to upgrade to rails 5 there is no published gem
Internally the usage of observers had quite a few problem.
The series of refactors renamed a bunch of classes to give us more clarity
and removed some magic.
Since rspec-rails 3, the default installation creates two helper files:
* `spec_helper.rb`
* `rails_helper.rb`
`spec_helper.rb` is intended as a way of running specs that do not
require Rails, whereas `rails_helper.rb` loads Rails (as Discourse's
current `spec_helper.rb` does).
For more information:
https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/docs/upgrade#default-helper-files
In this commit, I've simply replaced all instances of `spec_helper` with
`rails_helper`, and renamed the original `spec_helper.rb`.
This brings the Discourse project closer to the standard usage of RSpec
in a Rails app.
At present, every spec relies on loading Rails, but there are likely
many that don't need to. In a future pull request, I hope to introduce a
separate, minimal `spec_helper.rb` which can be used in tests which
don't rely on Rails.
Neil Lalonde
Sam
Arpit Jalan
Andy Waite
Régis Hanol
Robin Ward