Situation: Rails 2.3.x app being actively developed for an artist, which includes lots of large hi-res images.
It makes no sense to include all those images in every deployment, so an asset host + rsync would seem to be an easy answer.
On the other hand, the CSS and JavaScript files change frequently, so leaving them part of the normal app deployment (via Capistrano) also makes sense.
Thoughts? I'm sure someone has wrestled with this before 
not sure if this works in rails 2.3, but in 3.0 you could use jammit and jammit-s3 for that to deploy assets on amazon. jammit-s3 is now smart enough to not redeploy unchanged files.
Thanks for the response; I'd already looked at jammit and it seemed a lot more about compressing JS/CSS, inlining small images, etc. And I'm not seeing an immediate reason to add S3 into the situation.
Surprised not to see more ideas, maybe this is just too much of an
edge case? Back to the drawing board, I guess