Don't package them isn't a solution. It's sticking your head in the sand. Again and again in the Ruby world I see the "it works for us web developers on the x

Don't package them isn't a solution. It's sticking your head in the sand. Again and again in the Ruby world I see the "it works for us web developers on the x number of hosts we run". The people who use Ruby for stand-alone applications across multiple hosts are largely ignored. I'd love to see more Ruby out there - ignoring the needs of people other than developers guarantees that'll never happen. Big shops and sys admins who run non-web applications (and even those who run Ruby/Rails web applications and find the RubyGems/Passenger/Rails/Ruby/etc/etc intra/inter version interoperability failures baffling) will look at it as a manual, difficult to package solution and find other tools written in other languages. That'll be a real shame.