DebGem is on its way

This morning, I got a mail that made me very happy. I followed it up a bit, and some hours later, echoed it over the pkg-ruby-extras list. And, yes, a blog posting won't hurt :)
I have done some rantings on why it is so painful to integrate cultures such as Debian and Rails. Those rants were part of quite a large rant-net and attracted a fair share of traffic/comments over here. Flamefesting over your blog is fun! :-) but anyway, I am delighted to say that at least some people worth their weight in code were watching, interested.
The mail I got this morning (yes, follow the links above!) was from Hongli Lai, one of the very nice people at Phusion - The people behind Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Yes, people with a very different mindset to mine (specially when it comes to being a 100% Free Software person).
Hongli invited me to try their new DebGem service (still in Beta, although quite usable as it is). They are offering an auto-built full repository of Rubyforge, translated to Debian packages. They are currently supporting Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 (Intrepid and Hardy). And, yes, installing any arbitrary Ruby module is now just as easy as aptitude install libsomething-ruby. For over 20,000 Gems.
There is a catch, yes. The service is currently free, while they finish the public beta period. Their pricing is available.
Best luck to you guys. And... Shall you enjoy fierce competition from Debian proper! ;-)
[Update]: They just posted the official Beta announcement for DebGem