Problem Loading Extended Library From Third_Party

[eluser]volition23[/eluser]
As detailed in this thread:

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/210279/

I've been doing some work to leverage the third_party directory for shared code among multiple apps. I took Aken's advice to extend the Form_validation library's _execute() method with my new code snippet, and I created the following file in which the default Form_validation library is extended:

/some.application/third_party/shared/libraries/MY_Form_validation.php

Unfortunately, when I adjusted the code in my controller to call my extended class, I lost the validation behavior provided by my phone number helper. After some debugging, I determined the original Form_validation library was being instantiated and not my extended library. The reason is found in Loader::_ci_load_class(). Loader only looks for subclasses in the application's libraries folder and doesn't take into account those folders specified through Loader::add_package_path(). It WILL load stand-alone libraries that are not extensions of existing libraries however. The reason is the following:

Code:

foreach (array(ucfirst($class), strtolower($class)) as $class)
{
    $subclass = APPPATH.'libraries/'.$subdir.config_item('subclass_prefix').$class.'.php';
    if (file_exists($subclass))
    {
        ...
    }
}

As you can see, it's only checking the application's (APPPATH) libraries directory. I changed the above to the following, and my extended library now loads from APPPATH/third_party/shared/libraries.

Code:

foreach (array(ucfirst($class), strtolower($class)) as $class)
{
    $subclass = '';
    foreach ($this->_ci_library_paths as $path)
    {
        $subclass = $path.'libraries/'.$subdir.config_item('subclass_prefix').$class.'.php';
        if(file_exists($subclass)) break;
    }

    if (file_exists($subclass))
    {
        ...
    }
}

Can anyone see any reason why the loading of a subclass shouldn't work this way? Thanks.