[fendale]

> twitter-bootstrap-rails, therubyracer, and libv8

Those three gems recently caused me a world of pain. I've been in and out of Rails development since the 1.x versions (more hobby projects than professional development), and once getting going was as simple as 'gem install rails'. Getting the asset pipeline to work changed that totally - I get the advantages of the asset pipeline, and once you get it working and all your gem dependencies sorted it is fine, but it took me a while to get there.

[steveklabnik]

I don't even use therubyracer at all any more, personally. It's not generally neccesary; just {brew,apt-get} install nodejs and be done with it.

[kaffeinecoma]

Same here. In aggregate, I must have spent at least a two full days getting therubyracer and libv8 working in various environments.

As a recent Java refugee, one of the things I find most painful about Rails is its dependence on native code libs. It's really a lot of work to get the dependencies sorted out, especially if you have several platforms to support (say OSX for dev, and multiple Linux flavors for staging/prod).

One thing I learned (the hard way) is to heed the advice that "rvm requirements" offers. If you install the libs that it recommends before trying to install your gems, things will go more smoothly. This may sound obvious, but when you're installing Ruby, RVM, Rails, Apache, etc, it's easy to overlook the instructions.