Can someone describe to me how these jQuery releases make their way into Rails 3.1 land? Does the maintainer of https://github.com/rails/jquery-rails do an update and then it's up to us Rails users to execute a "bundle update"?
If you haven't tried rails-behaviors[1], I recommend it. It's a modular, drop-in replacement for jquery_ujs, and I think @josh will update it shortly for 1.7
curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.js > vendor/assets/javascripts/jquery.js
My recommendation would be to maintain dependency versions yourself, i.e. download the version of jQuery you want to use and //= require jquery in application.js - then grab a new version of jQuery whenever you want it updated
The gem is a very thin wrapper around jQuery, jQuery UI and jquery_ujs, which basically makes the files available for inclusion in your manifests, and adds a jQuery specific helper method for your tests.