[FrozenCow]

> Of course there are exceptions {...} put it in a tarball in /opt, make some symlinks to /usr/local

This becomes unmanageable once you need to do that for multiple applications. Different applications need different versions. I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but you can imagine different versions of Ruby itself needing different versions of system libraries. An upgrade of your OS could become incompatible with the Ruby version you just compiled yourself.

It's good that some people are looking for solutions to this problem. It's a worthwhile effort, even though it might not be directly applicable to everyone. Same was true for Systemd a number of years ago.

[otterley]

In practice it hasn't really been much of a manageability problem at any of the (reasonably large) companies whose servers I've maintained. There are perhaps five or six mission-critical packages that need to be kept up, and since we only support two target distributions, the order of complexity is quite small.

The key is to define your constraints clearly and not to deviate from them unless you have to.