If you specify needed gems in environment.rb (config.gem ... ) then there are rake tasks for unpacking the gems into your app. Things might be more interesting with something like ruby since that has native code ( the rake tasks can also build the gems for you but I assume you access to a machine close enough to your deployment platform that it can compile code that runs on that) and even more interesting with one like rmagick since that depends on the imagemagick libraries being installed.
Fred
