I've been using FPM to build native packages for applications for the last few months and so far I cannot believe just how cool it is. It can create RPMs and DEBs from ruby gems, python modules, node packages and even directories. The last one is very useful for packaging up stand-alone java apps. Check it out, you may like it too....
On a few projects now I’ve used jruby with rake. I know that I can use rvm and just fetch the gems per project, but for developers stuck on windows that way is a little more than difficult. So here’s how I package up rubygems in a JAR. mkdir gemjar java -jar jruby-complete-1.6.3.jar -S gem install -i ./gemjar haml --version 3.1.2 --no-rdoc --no-ri java -jar jruby-complete-1.6.3.jar -S gem install -i ....