The new Rails release (0.14) includes a very loose support for plugins, right? You drop plugins in vender/plugins and done. At David’s request, folks have been dropping their plugins on the wiki and now you can get a script which scans the wiki page for URIs and presents you with a list of plugins you can install.
This reminds me of the old RAA-Install that got born after RubyConf 2002. I love this kind of hack’ry. Using the simplest of protocols and conventions to get bootstrapped.