Namespacing /lib Files and RSpec

I've been in an ongoing battle with RSpec to get it to properly load files in the /lib directory of a rails app. There's a class MetalArchivesFetcher wrapped in a MetalDetectr module as a namespace:

module MetalDetectr
  class MetalArchivesFetcher
    ...
  end
end

The spec file starts like this:

require 'spec_helper'
require 'metal_archives_fetcher'

describe MetalDetectr::MetalArchivesFetcher do
  ...
end

Without the require, I would receive the message, load_missing_constant': Expected /Users/danny/code/metaldetectr/lib/metal_archives_fetcher.rb to define MetalArchivesFetcher (LoadError) It felt a little off to need to require the file again because Rails already loads it in with config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"] set in the config/application.rb file. I could put the require in spec_helper.rb, but it still felt strange.

I decided to remove the module namespace. That lets me remove the require line and all preceding MetalDetectr:: for every MetalArchivesFetcher call in the spec. Is this the right decision? It's definitely DRYer, but I do create tighter coupling. Jim Weirich's talk, "The Building Blocks of Modularity" (that I can't find online) does go over the trade-offs of writing code that is either more tightly or loosely coupled, and my takeaway from that is, since this file is already coupled to the application and models within it, why add an additional layer? It's more of a perceived loosening while only adding a bit more complexity. And that's usually not a good thing.

Perhaps I'll add it back in later, but for now, I'm not going to need it.