Rails 3 & plugin paths

I'm currently working on a rails app that separates open-source plugins and company specific plugins into two folders, /vendor/plugins and /vendor/shared_plugins by adding /vendor/shared_plugins to config.plugin_paths . The initial refactoring of plugins http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/82b9b151ffde44305d67744c0bfd9bb5505f6fbe will take config.plugin_paths away. Can it be brought back?

I'm trying to create a Rails Engine for Rails 3 and I'm having a similar problem. To test a Rails Engine plugin, you have to embed a full Rails application inside of the plugin's test folder. There are a couple of old tricks for loading the plugin into the embedded Rails app, for testing: Testing Rails Engine Gems – Justin Ball Those tricks don't work any more, and it would really help me to be able to load the plugin using the config.plugin_paths setting.

Any other ideas for how to go about testing a Rails Engine plugin under Rails 3 would be much appreciated.