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Daniel Berger blogged about how to make 'include' a little more flexible by allowing to rename or exclude specific methods.

He proposed the following syntax:

module TFoo
    def method_a
       "hello"
    end
    def method_b
       "world"
    end
end

module TBar
    def method_a
       "goodbye"
    end
    def method_b
       "cruel world"
    end
    def method_y
       "huh?"
    end
end

class MyKlass
    include TFoo,
      :alias   => {:method_a, :method_z},
      :exclude => :method_b

    include TBar
end

m = MyKlass.new
m.method_a                                         # => "goodbye"
m.method_b                                         # => "cruel world"
m.method_y                                         # => "huh?"
m.method_z                                         # => "hello"

Making it happen

Here's my implementation. I think somebody might have posted such a thing to ruby-talk, but anyway this must have been written for the first time by some Japanese Rubyist years ago, so yet another reinvention won't matter nor hurt.

This definition of Class#include should be a fairly safe replacement for the default one since I'm not raising an exception when there's a nameclash (which I rather feel is a bad idea, but I haven't given this much thought), but maybe it could make sense to create a new method with those semantics.

The code: