Comment 4 for bug 244742

Shot,

Many Ubuntu packages are direct sync's from Debian packages which is considered "upstream" from Ubuntu. While we could fork the packaging and add our own changes, that adds considerable work to each new release of the package. Changes and improvements should go as far upstream as possible/applicable to avoid the high cost of maintenance. You can usually tell which packages are maintained locally because they will have a version like 'foo-1.0.0-1ubuntu1'. I don't see a wiki entry about this, but see this [1] IRC session for more information.

This can also be a slippery slope. Many gems require additional development packages to be installed because they compile extensions [2] rather than only installing ruby libraries. However I agree that ruby1.8-dev is reasonable. Since gems is currently synced from debian, and being a complex package that we should all work on together, we should defer the resolution of this ticket to the upstream debian bug.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/devweek0901/Package
[2] http://blog.loftninjas.org/2008/09/25/installing-the-oniguruma-gem-on-debianubuntu/