This is the main reason I think we need distributions (in the Debian sense) of gems. It needs to be ok for the gem authors to go ahead and break compatibility if they need to. App maintainers also need to know that they are safe unless they choose to opt in to breaking changes. A distribution would act as the go-between.
If you've got sane library management processes, you're pretty much safe, but that's a huge amount of wasted effort - everybody has to figure it out for themselves. Right now, it's downright dangerous relying on upstream gems directly unless you know exactly what you're doing, and a distribution layer would let everyone share a common knowledge about which gem versions go well together.
It would also give a handy insertion point for backporting security fixes, which currently doesn't happen very often.
If you've got sane library management processes, you're pretty much safe, but that's a huge amount of wasted effort - everybody has to figure it out for themselves. Right now, it's downright dangerous relying on upstream gems directly unless you know exactly what you're doing, and a distribution layer would let everyone share a common knowledge about which gem versions go well together.
It would also give a handy insertion point for backporting security fixes, which currently doesn't happen very often.