Au contraire: the Debian world has crippled RubyGems, which focusses on making Ruby packaging work everywhere, while Apple made modifications that made it work as Rubyists expect without causing problems for Apple's own needs. Eric Hodel modified this to make it easier for Linux distro maintainers to allow RubyGems to work as Rubyists expect yet not break the distro's expectations. The Debian maintainers chose not to adopt this. I don't use other distros, so I don't know whether they did or not.
What I've never personally understood is why the distro maintainers didn't embrace RubyGems. There's no reason that a .deb couldn't simply wrap a .gem and use the RubyGems infrastructure to install it into a "protected" area (preventing 'gem remove' from working, per the modifications noted above). A .gem can even be a repackaged version that includes platform-specific compiled code so that it could be distributed to machines without compilers (this is one thing that could be improved for RubyGems; allowing users to gemify a built gem for deployment purposes). I've suggested this in the past and it's been met with derision from OS maintainers. I don't understand why: as I understand it, this is what happens with BSD ports of gems.
So no, the Ruby community hasn't thrown rocks from the sidelines. We've made constructive suggestions that have been derided or ignored; so ignored, we've made our own solutions that work well for our needs.
What I've never personally understood is why the distro maintainers didn't embrace RubyGems. There's no reason that a .deb couldn't simply wrap a .gem and use the RubyGems infrastructure to install it into a "protected" area (preventing 'gem remove' from working, per the modifications noted above). A .gem can even be a repackaged version that includes platform-specific compiled code so that it could be distributed to machines without compilers (this is one thing that could be improved for RubyGems; allowing users to gemify a built gem for deployment purposes). I've suggested this in the past and it's been met with derision from OS maintainers. I don't understand why: as I understand it, this is what happens with BSD ports of gems.
So no, the Ruby community hasn't thrown rocks from the sidelines. We've made constructive suggestions that have been derided or ignored; so ignored, we've made our own solutions that work well for our needs.