Can you override an aliased method in Ruby?

Question

In Ruby, when a method is aliased, the alias points to the body of the original method. So even if you redefine the original method, the alias will continue to use the original definition.

class Foo
  def bar
    "bar"
  end  
  alias :saloon :bar
end

class Foo
  def bar
    "BAR"
  end
end

puts Foo.new.saloon

will return 'bar' and not 'BAR'. Is there any way to get saloon to use the new definition of bar?

EDIT: I should have been more clear. The example was just an illustration of the issue - it's not the actual problem I need to solve. The issue is more complex when you have chained aliases, for example, in rails' core. E.g. perform_action is aliased by benchmarking module, and then also by flash module. So now a call to perform_action is actually calling perform_action_with_flash which does it's thing, then effectively calls perform_action_with_benchmarking which then calls the original perform_action. If I want to override perform_action_with_benchmarking (even though I agree it's a bad idea - please let's not get into a discussion of that as it's besides the point), I can't because it has been aliased, and as far as I can tell the alias is pointing to what is essentially a copy of the original perform_action_with_benchmarking, so even if I redefine it, there's no effect.

Answer 1

Just re-establish the alias:

class Foo
  def bar
    "bar"
  end  
  alias :saloon :bar
end

class Foo
  def bar
    "BAR"
  end
  alias :saloon :bar
end

puts Foo.new.saloon # => "BAR"