Extlib gem breaks further usage of Arrays, passed as splat argument to the method with keyword arguments in Ruby 2.3

[GolubevV]

I am using Chef nexus cookbook, which manages Nexus configuration and is using nexus-cli gem under the curtains.Everything works well on Chef 11 with Ruby 1.9.3

However when running cookbook and gem on Chef 12 with Ruby 2.3, the previously working functionality gets broken due to incorrect Array argument expand when it is passed to the method via splat ( *) parameter.

The problem is coming from the fact, that extlib gem usage adds to_hash method to the Array class here, which results in incorrect keyword argument expand on Ruby 2.3 - more info about keyword arguments

Here is an example from PRY:

[1] pry(main)> def test_method(*args, **opts) puts "Args are: #{args}"; puts "Opts are: #{opts}" end
=> :test_method
[2] pry(main)> test_method('key',['value'])
Args are: ["key", ["value"]]
Opts are: {}
=> nil
[3] pry(main)> require 'extlib'
=> true
[4] pry(main)> test_method('key',['value'])
Args are: ["key", {"value"=>nil}]
Opts are: {}
=> nil

As such, this behavior breaks functionality of Chef, for example, for group management operations which is calling shell_out_compact! method:

# call method, which is using keyword arguments:
def manage_group
  shell_out_compact!("groupmod", set_options)
  modify_group_members
end

# definitions of the shell_out method
def shell_out_compact!(*args, **options)
  if options.empty?
    shell_out!(*clean_array(*args))
  else
    shell_out!(*clean_array(*args), **options)
  end
end

So question here - is the usage of 'extlib' gem still required for nexus_cli when running it on Ruby 2.3. Can nexus_cli gem be refactored not to use it at least for Ruby 2.3+