This may not be a popular opinion, but I have a suspicion that the high degree of wheel reinvention in the world of Ruby and Rails libraries is due to two things: NIH Syndrome & the professed preference by employers for people with active GitHub projects. This causes all kinds of people to make their own gems and such where existing implementations could be improved without such a division (diffusion?) of labor.
To make it worse, GitHub only occasionally shows commit activity on repos belonging to other people. I have plenty of side-projects going over on a communal account at http://github.com/smashcon. If I work on some of those repos for a couple of weeks, however, to the casual observer it appears as if I haven't been doing anything at all.
(The canonical answer appears to be "fork and use pull requests", but at this point in the project they're just too clumsy for little benefit, particularly each only has a single committer.)
https://github.com/pengwynn/faraday_middleware
The vast majority of commits are by https://github.com/sferik though.
I don't think pengwynn is gaming the system, but if someone wanted to, this is how they could do it.
If you're a consultant hopping from one client gig to the next each few months, it's great. If you maintain your own things, it gets frustrating when things you relied on are no longer maintained because the developer got tired of putting up with putdowns about how his project "sucks" and [x] is the new hot way to log people in. :)
It assumes you're using git, supports multiple stages out of the box, uses a reset strategy by default instead of having to hack it in etc.
I'm planning on playing with it today.
we have custom vlad plugins for usual rails related stuff, so our config/deploy.rb scripts are usually about 5-10 lines long. see https://github.com/astrails/vladify
As today generation programmers, we often prefer to work on new features, new things as opposed to keeping things stable and fixing all the kinks.
Back in the old days, people were so happy if they could submit a patch.
Interesting that he roots for homebrew over macports and rbenv over rvm while at the same time voting for capistrano. Of those 3 projects I find macports and rvm to do what I need from them perfectly and capistrano to be really lacking in both performance and complexity.