I want to use JRuby and Rails in an application built with NetBeans 6.  Most of this is easy -- until I tried to use a
Postgres based database.  Then, I encountered the error that org.postgresql.Driver could not be loaded.  There are
actually two different issues here, both of which count as bugs in my book.

* If you right click on the project, select Set Configuration --> Customize and category "Java",
  you can click "Add JAR/Folder" and manually point at the driver JAR file (although the Mac finder
  dialog makes this impossible if you want to use the copy embedded inside NB itself).  However,
  this approach has a fatal flaw -- it updates "nbproject/project.properties" with a path that is
  local to my own development environment, and will create a mess if I check this file into an SCM
  system (very typical for shared developer environments).  Any such settings should be saved in
  the "nbproject/private" directory.

* The only other way I could find to make this work at all was to manually copy (or symlink) the
  Postgres JDBC driver jar into the "lib" directory of the embedded copy of JRuby in use.  This is
  very bad, given the lack of GUI support for the operation, and the fact that symlinks do not exist
  on Windows so it leads to a proliferation of copies of the JAR file.

A "best practices" approach would be to provide a way for the developer to:

* Manage a set of JAR files (or directories) that are implicitly added to the
  class path for *all* Ruby projects.  Or, dreaming big time, a way to set up
  "profiles" of sets of things that could be selected by set-name for a project,
  instead of individually.

* Persist the data behind these choices in nbproject/private, since the paths
  will be unique to a particular developer.  (Alternatively, an analog to the
  way that NB supports "library dependency projects" in the Java world
  would be even better.)

* Some way to share the set of references that a Ruby project requires
  so that other developers can be guided through the required configuration steps
  to make the necessary JAR files available.  The library dependency project approach
  would make lots of sense here.