Again Rails has proven the old adage:
"Those who do not know history are doomed to reimplement it, badly"
They thought they were being so tricky with gems, but now we see the problems, there is something totally hosed at gems.rubyonrails.org, and it refuses to install Rails 1.2.6 for me. No thank you, I don't want to use Rails 1.99 beta for my production code, thank you.
Thus concludes my rant for this evening.