Inspired by a dinner conversation at The Rails Edge, Bruce Williams has created a Rails patch to enable Rails to load plugins installed as gems.

With this patch, you get plugins with the dependency- and version-management goodness of RubyGems. Here’s hoping it gets applied.

On a related note, Marcel pointed out last night that we’re up to over 1000 unique gems in the main repository. I wonder if it’s time to look at some kind of namespacing.