apt-get or yum for ruby? Hell yes. After wasting countless hours on random versions of crap scattered around some servers' filesystems but not others, now nothing hits production without being in a package that installs and uninstalls cleanly and declares everything it relies on being present. That includes my own code, which we package ourselves.
Hear hear. Nothing strikes fear in my heart like a /usr/local hierarchy filled with a million random versions of random programs. BTW, if you are going to install something into /usr/local, at least use a cheap and easy packager like GNU "stow".
A user can manage his/her own stuff in ~/bin and add it to path if he/she wants.
A sysadmin can put things somewhere like /usr/local/experiment33 and make sweeping changes just by changing the default path, which a user could override for customization.
