I believe in the case of apt-get it's the responsibility of the Debian project. It's the same with other tools (yum, brew, macports). Rails itself is normally

I believe in the case of apt-get it's the responsibility of the Debian project. It's the same with other tools (yum, brew, macports). Rails itself is normally installed via Rubygems (where it's updated directly by the Rails team), but the problem in this case lies with Ruby: for an up-to-date development/production environment you have to compile it by yourself or use something like RVM.