I think the issue is one of development speed. Currently things like passenger and puppet are behind on Ubuntu LTS packaging because their development cycle is

I think the issue is one of development speed. Currently things like passenger and puppet are behind on Ubuntu LTS packaging because their development cycle is much faster than LTS releases. Apache on the other hand is well past that point, while nginx is probably somewhere in between. Right now I install passenger through gems but I'll be moving that to the just released deb repository the phusion guys have just released and eventually I expect development to quiet down enough that Ubuntu's packaging will be up to date enough. So basically I expect software packaging to evolve in three steps: 1. When in fast development get it from gems (my case with passenger now) 2. When it starts getting mature (or as soon as you have resources to do enough QA) build a deb repository (puppetlabs does this for puppet) 3. When it becomes stable and boring just use what's in the system (apache and thousands of other things) Moving from step 1 to 2 is probably not natural for a lot of ruby (and python to a lesser extent) developers because they see their software in the context of apps that are "things you deploy to a host" not "things that are part of the base system".