I wouldn't know, seems like it could be a somewhat common use case. I was just tryin' to help ;)
In any case, I don't know about making it a patch, but you could make it into a plugin and stick it on github and rubyforge. You'd be able to use it from multiple apps easily, and if there *is* interest in it, people can use it and contribute and whatnot.
Off-topic, making code like that reusable and public is never a waste of time, imo. Every once in a while I'll get a thank-you or a feature request for some little util I wrote, pushed public, and forgot -- and it's pretty neat.