This seems to me to be an issue that there is some disagreement on between devs and ops people - most devs are happy to distribute software with a Gemfile and see it as a solved problem. Ops packages tend to go the omnibus route like Chef has, or use Jruby and package as a Jar file like http://logstash.net/

I wonder if there is anything developers can do as a community to help solve the problems these distributors feel they have?