Can I be the jerk on this thread to raise my hand and say, "from what I can see, every single thing Debian has done with Ruby, from the way they split Ruby up into separate packages to the mindboggling damage they inflicted on RubyGems, has worked to the detriment of Ruby and provided no discernable benefit to end-users"?

For at least a year now, I've simply accepted that Debian's Ruby lives in a parallel bizarro-universe, rm'd any trace of it that intrudes on my own (real) universe, and installed everything from source.

I write this not to feel better about myself but to attract the passionate, angry disagreements that will help me better understand the problems this guy was trying to solve, so I can understand how he looks at the world and what his decision means instead of silently hoping that this post means nobody is going to try to integrate Debian and Ruby anymore.