Comment 4 for bug 706603

You can install gems from debian packages which _cannot_ put things into /usr/local/. You can also install gems directly. This would probably be a nightmare to maintain.

In my personal opinion the /var/lib path is broken too. The problem with the "language-centric" repositories and their client-side package managers is that they have to clash with the system packager. They clash for filesystem namespace (apt-get/yum install foo vs pip/gem install foo) and clash for semantics (one-vs-more-than-one version at a time).

A suboptimal solution (at least for ruby where you _want_ to install many versions of one thing at a time) that would still improve the situation could make this:

* work on rubygems to have a debian-connector that automatically keeps the debian metadata in sync (so packages installed via gem behave the same as packages installed with dpkg, except that they don't pick up non-ruby dependencies).
* install things into /usr/lib and /usr/bin

If anyone is willing to try doing this (the same debian-connector, or perhaps dpkg-connector) could be used for python and pip as well) feel free to start discussing and drafting this here. I was considering doing this a while ago.