Will you do me a favor and file this bug report for me? I'm allergic to sanctimony which I'm sure is all you'll receive from the package maintainer:
"gem update --system is disabled on Debian. RubyGems can be updated using the official Debian repositories by aptitude or apt-get."
That's a pretty absurd claim. Is there anything to back it up?
I mean, releasing an open source operating system doesn't seem to be the epitome of "control and lock in" to me. Ubuntu probably wouldn't exist if Debian were any good at "control and lock in", for one.
Also, your "bug report" is quite different than the one Zed points out. You're suggesting a fundamental change to the way rubygems works on Debian. That's something that merits further discussion, rather than a simple "bug report", obviously.
By the way, your "post" is quite the "epitome" of total "air quotery".
He also says that "it is sadly pure business and has nothing to do with open source, quality, or culture." which is pretty odd, given that Debian is a non-profit, voluntary organization.
It does seem silly from a rubyist's perspective but their approach does make a heck of a lot of complicated software work together in a way that makes administering complex server setups a doddle compared to how it could be.
There's just a yawning philosophical gap between how the Debian and Ruby communities look at the world and approach software management.
I'd say that it's more that if there's no (current) way to track what the other package management system is doing on the distro (any distro, not just Debian) then they can't tell what packages are installed and hence whether the distro-supplied packages can work with them...
If everyone thinks you're off in the wilderness, you might want to check yourself, maybe just a bit.
2. These packaging systems were all designed by and for developers. Debian was designed by and for system administrators. The fact that there are common problems is not surpising.
Of course, it's the debian maintainers' prerogative to structure things such that others generally pick up their toys and go play in their own sandboxes. I just get irritated when I hear people griping about it when it happens, as if system-level package managers have some kind of inherent priority.