So this plugin by Dr Nik Williams (no link available) does this:
Link or freeze RubyGems into your rails apps, instead of just plugins. This allows you to ‘vendor everything’ – pushing all dependent gems into your rails app thus ensuring your application will be guaranteed to work when deployed. Your application is no longer dependent on the gems that are/aren’t available on your target deployment environment.
I found this very useful, mainly because for some gems I want to see and maybe play with the code, usual I just copy the gem to lib. This provides a simple way of bringing in only one gem. I know there are features in 2.1 that deal with gem dependencies and do some cool stuff, but from what I know (from Ryan Bates) I don’t think they provide this particular functionality.
Its available on RubyForge. Or just by using the “sudo gem install gemsonrails” command.
