This is a very familiar pain point for me. IMHO many problems with RoR deployment stem from the fact that Ruby depends on so many native code extensions. It's pathetically easy to break things like therubyracer or nokogiri because some .so file was updated or is not installed. I'm guessing that this is done for performance issues with the Ruby interpreter, but wow, it really makes for portability nightmares. Add RVM on top of this and it's just insane.
As someone coming from Java (I largely switched from Java to Rails about a year ago) I find this tendency toward native code deps incredibly painful. Turns out there's a really good reason to demand "100% pure Java" libraries. One can always throw rocks at Maven or CLASSPATH hell, but I find that Ruby deploys tend to be much more problematic than Java.
Whatever you decide on I hope you get some relief. FWIW I have benefited greatly from your work on Capistrano, and sincerely appreciate your efforts.
As someone coming from Java (I largely switched from Java to Rails about a year ago) I find this tendency toward native code deps incredibly painful. Turns out there's a really good reason to demand "100% pure Java" libraries. One can always throw rocks at Maven or CLASSPATH hell, but I find that Ruby deploys tend to be much more problematic than Java.
Whatever you decide on I hope you get some relief. FWIW I have benefited greatly from your work on Capistrano, and sincerely appreciate your efforts.