Traveling Ruby is not meant to be used by users to package up an existing app. It's meant to be used by app developers to package up their apps. You would never

Traveling Ruby is not meant to be used by users to package up an existing app. It's meant to be used by app developers to package up their apps. You would never use Traveling Ruby to package up Gitlab; instead, Gitlab HQ might use Traveling Ruby to package up Gitlab. I'm not sure who your rant is targeted at. Traveling Ruby is meant to solve exactly the problem that you're ranting about. Developers use Traveling Ruby to create a package that is self-contained, and no further dependencies, and doesn't conflict with any of the stuff that is already installed. Think of a Traveling Ruby-packaged app as a single exe. Not physically (because the package consists of multiple files), but spiritually/conceptually (because as a user, you only run a single file, and the result doesn't conflict with anything else on the system). You can compare it spiritually to Go. Go produces single binaries with no dependencies, that you can just run. You can still integrate this stuff with Puppet or Chef or whatever; Traveling Ruby doesn't stop you from doing that, not makes it harder for you.