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You only see what your eyes want to see
How can life be what you want it to be
You're frozen... -- Madonna

The way to ensure that your production rails apps don't get messed up should the provider update gems is to freeze them. Moreover, it's a good idea to embed the gems/plugins needed for a particular application; it makes distribution of different versions easier, not to mention that you know exactly with which resources your code is working.

To freeze rails, you can either do a rake rails:freeze:gems, which uses the installed gems to freeze, or rake rails:freeze:edge which freezes off of the rails subversion repository. The last one allows you to specify a version to which to freeze. When it's time to thaw, rake rails:unfreeze will remove the frozen rails installation.

To embed gems in your application, use Gems On Rails, which will place gems into vendor/gems.