The Perfect Weapon

Ever run the “gems:unpack” Rake task in a Rails app, and wondered why one or more of your gems was silently skipped?

Any gem that is loaded in your Rakefile (e.g. metric_fu, vlad, etc) is considered to be a ‘framework gem’ by Rails, and such gems are not unpacked. Given that the vendor/gems directory is not yet in the load path when the Rakefile is loading, this is probably a good idea.

In other words, if you have a library that provides Rake tasks, or is otherwise necessary for your .rake files to be valid, don’t expect “config.gem” and friends to handle it for you.