[scotje]

Thanks, those are all fair points.

The reason I went with "vendor everything" several years ago was that I had to make some changes to a legacy codebase and discovered that one of the gems it depended on was no longer available. It wasn't the end of the world to refactor around it, but it motivated me to find a way to ensure I would always have a local copy of all the dependencies for each app.

Someone in the comments of the rubygems.org story yesterday mentioned using a submodule for vendor/cache which seems like an interesting idea to me. That could at least partially address #3.