I developed PDF::Writer entirely on Windows and used RubyGems extensively. With the new Ruby Installer work by Luis Lavena and others, RubyGems is now amazingly awesome on Windows.
The Linuxes are the least-well represented and the least interested in working with RubyGems developers. There are hooks to make things work better: they were first offered by Apple and subsequently modified by Eric Hodel to be more generic so that Debian could benefit. They refused to use these vendor hooks.
You're right that apps that target "desktop" users bundle Ruby, but I remember a game from 2001 that bundled Python. This is no different. Apps need to control their dependencies (my company's backup app includes vendor-locked versions of OpenSSL in the program directory because we can't trust full compatibility without that)
Edited to add:
The RubyGems multiple version feature (which is one of the things that the Debian team seems to dislike) doesn't assign any meaning to version levels. The fact that 1.2.3 usually means "major version 1, minor version 2, patch version 3" is entirely social and of no meaning to RubyGems. The only thing that it cares about is that version A is comparably larger or smaller than version B. I could have version 1.2.3.4.5 and 1.3.5.7 and it would only care that the latter is larger (because the second level of the latter is larger than the second level of the former).
Removing this but keeping "top-level" versions would encourage people to rev their top-level versions more often. This may not be a bad thing, but it won't give you the effect you think it will.
The Linuxes are the least-well represented and the least interested in working with RubyGems developers. There are hooks to make things work better: they were first offered by Apple and subsequently modified by Eric Hodel to be more generic so that Debian could benefit. They refused to use these vendor hooks.
You're right that apps that target "desktop" users bundle Ruby, but I remember a game from 2001 that bundled Python. This is no different. Apps need to control their dependencies (my company's backup app includes vendor-locked versions of OpenSSL in the program directory because we can't trust full compatibility without that)
Edited to add:
The RubyGems multiple version feature (which is one of the things that the Debian team seems to dislike) doesn't assign any meaning to version levels. The fact that 1.2.3 usually means "major version 1, minor version 2, patch version 3" is entirely social and of no meaning to RubyGems. The only thing that it cares about is that version A is comparably larger or smaller than version B. I could have version 1.2.3.4.5 and 1.3.5.7 and it would only care that the latter is larger (because the second level of the latter is larger than the second level of the former).
Removing this but keeping "top-level" versions would encourage people to rev their top-level versions more often. This may not be a bad thing, but it won't give you the effect you think it will.