Compiling Ruby by hand is fine if you're running purpose-built VPSs, or cloud instances, or whatever the hip new phrase is, but for people who manage systems in the old world where 1 machine = 1 OS install and multiple, commingled services, it's an entirely different ballgame. Managers of these systems can't vet each and every interpreter on the system.

If someone in web integration walks through the door with a request for a Ruby interpreter to use a set of scripts for integrating the company's new website with the old back-end finance systems, the sysadmin's first stop is the stable package repository for their chosen distribution. Compiling by hand is yet another exception that must be tracked.

In enterprise environments were IT staff are outnumbered by a couple of orders of magnitude, exceptions are the proverbial "death of a thousand cuts". That is why failure to play ball with package management systems like apt is a poor choice. It will hurt the adoption of Ruby in many environments.

I pretty much disagree with your whole point. I mostly program C, C++, and Prolog on *nix, and I rarely have to compile anything except for my own software (obviously). Debian provides nearly all libraries I'd ever use as a package.

If other people want to use my software, I can tell them to install dependencies such and such, or even provide a Debian package of my software. I don't want them to need to put the effort in reconstructing my build environment.