The problem isn't specific to rails. I do a lot of development that requires Ruby libraries not available from the repos, and some of those in turn depend on rubygems. It's analogous to cpan for Perl (which is packaged) and pretty much ubiquitous among Ruby developers. I've installed rubygems on every Ubuntu machine I've ever used, without taking any of the precautions others have taken, and I've never had a problem. I know there are potential problems, but Ruby developers ought to be free to take that risk.
PS. Other than this, I take great pains to to restrict myself to the package management system, which is only plausible because the vast majority of what I need is available that way. -- Rails needs gems https://launchpad.net/bugs/34840 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
