[prodigal_erik]

I think this is because most developers haven't (yet) been paged at 3 AM to discover that everything is fucked because a handful of critical servers somehow still have bugs in libraries that were already fixed. I'm a developer and I think language-specific package ghettos are a pretty crazy way to handle deployment to production. Any dependency I can't express in the same way as all the others (namely my platform's one and only package manager) is a ticking bomb.

[lucaspiller]

So on the latest version of Ubuntu (12.10), if I run "apt-get install rails" I get Rails 2.3. That was originally released over 4 years ago. There have been (nearly) 4 major releases since then. How do you work around that, or do you not?

[fennecfoxen]

One way to work around that is to host an internal apt/yum/etc repository and put whatever you need into a package there.

[andyl]

A nice way to build apt repositories is to use fpm. https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

Although for just installing rails, using rubygems is the way to go, IMHO.