[csense]

> never the OS's package management

Non-OS installation is a huge barrier to new users of a Ruby application. I installed Gitlab recently. Take a look at the length of the installation guide [1]. There are seven numbered steps, some of which involve multiple commands.

Upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 was about the same complexity.

Thanks to the thoroughness of its author, the guide largely worked as advertised. But being able to install and upgrade with apt-get would have saved me hours.

[1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/stable/doc/install...

[hosh]

It is the case for now, but won't be much for longer. I expect application developers to start versioning Vagrantfile, Berkfile, etc. so that someone can bring up at least dev versions of apps.