I am begining to experiment with Ruby on Rails, until now I found the first thing I dislike about it,  the RubyGems packaging system. I do not want to use another packaging system different that the one provided by the OS, be it RPM or Debian packages, or any other option; I do not want to have files on the /usr filesystem that are not managed by the OS packager tool, I want to be sure that running the OS update tool is enough to have my system up-to-date (yum update). So the only solution I have is to build RPM packages for the ruby libraries I need and submit them to Fedora Extras.

Temporally I have created the ruby-gems RPM package, and I am using the environment variables GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to install ruby packages on my home directory.

I found a Debian Extras position document about RubyGems, and I agree with that position.