I've been wondering for awhile if the Plugin system is something worth taking out of Rails. It's not that I have anything against Rails plugins, but I cant find any way in which they are superior to RubyGems.

Two benefits I have heard are: The code can be packaged with the application and Rails auto-loads plugins. While I agree that these two things are important, it's possible to achieve the first by using gem unpack and it's also possible to auto-load unpacked gems.

Another benefit I've heard is that plugins are easier to create. I've never created a plugin, but Dr Nic has made it quite easy to create gems using newgem.

While I cant find any features that plugins provide and gems do not, RubyGems do provide features that are not available in plugins such as versioning and dependencies.

So, a question and a request:

What benefits do plugins provide?

If there are no benefits to plugins, create gems for your reusable Ruby code instead of plugins.