RPM and GEMS - Unholy marriage

Hi everyone, I've been following the discussion on RPM and GEMS conflict of interest. I found it quite interesting, and I would like to discuss some packaging options already present within ruby and rails. There are three things I would like to add to Jeroen's page: 1) A valid Rails RPM package *explicit* links to gems required. Strictly speaking, you can lazy load the gems an application needs. This might work, especially if you use gems that are very common (like Rails). Problem is, that a critical dependency is missing. You can add this info in the RPM spec, but I think it is better to make it mandatory more downstream. For RPM packaging, all you need to do is ask for the dependent gems. My question: what are your thoughts on this? 2) A valid Rails RPM package must contain the version when specifying gems and the version must be limited. Example: # require 'aws/s3' config.gem 'aws-s3', :lib => 'aws/s3', :version => '0.4.0', # :source => "http://code.whytheluckystiff.net" (see also http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Configuration.html#M002064) This means that the module will use any version greater than 0.4.0. You can also specify smaller, a range or a specific number. The trick is this: if you do this correctly, you can use multiple gem versions on the same system. In theory, this must work. This is what was causing the issue with Lighthouse. I think you should fix the version or make it a range, never a 'greater than' (as in the example and with Lighthouse). My question: what are your thoughts on this, especially the mandatory 'limit the version number'? 3) Gems can be vendorized. OK, this is the moment where a lot of people are going to be amazed, mouth open and staring at the screen for the next five minutes: you can make a Rails application and include the gems in it, as it where local code. This is called vendorization. A vendorized gem is only available to the application using it: it is part of the source code of that application and located in the /vendor directory of the application root (not in the normal gem directory). In fact, you can vendorize a gem and then even modify the code. On one hand, if you say all gems should be vendorized, you don't have any version conflicts. On the other hand, I heard someone complain about static linking... Personally, I disagree with the vendorization of gems. It obfuscates version management. Question: does Fedore prefer (or mandatorize) a specific approach? Why? Thanks in advance, Bert