It is sad to see how people complain about how packaging Ruby gems is painful. It seems like it is the Java packaging game all over again where any application ships its dependencies in a lib/ directory (or in the case of Rails, vendor/). Mac OS X applications seem to do some of the same thing by shipping lots of libraries in their application bundle, which is really just a directory with some magic files in it.

This is of course just like static linking, which we made away with for most software many years ago, mostly due to the pain associated with any kind of security updates.

Update: What I find sad is that people keep making the same mistakes we made and corrected years ago, not that people are complaining about those mistakes.

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