When I first got involved with Red Hat (back with 5.2 in the early 90's) I learned the hard way not to use language-specific packaging systems like CPAN for Perl because they'd conflict with RPM's database and make it much harder to manage what was installed on my system. If I now need a package for which no RPM is available, I'll use a utility like cpanspec to repackage it into an RPM and install that.
Now I'm starting to work with Ruby and apparently it has its own packages called "gems". How do people deal with making Ruby and RPM get along?
I'm trying to build Diaspora, an open source alternative to Facebook, and it wants me to install a ton of gems. I'm working on a "disposable" machine that I can re-image at will, so I let it use Ruby's "bundle install" command to dump all the gems from the Ruby repositories into their system location. But in a "real" installation I'd want to do this with RPM, repackaging gems as needed. What's available to do this properly?
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Running-Diaspora