[toretore]

The point about not requiring rubygems in a library or a gem (as ironic as that may sound) is that by doing so you're coupling your implementation to your environment. This is as bad as coupling your classes to global constants, and not something you should do. Case in point: Rails allows you to "unpack" gems to make your app more portable, and it shouldn't matter if the "foo" gem uses the unpacked version or the one installed in the gem repository on the server.