On the LibraryFind project we're freezing gems for rails and a few
other useful libraries into our version control tree.  This is
useful, as different versions we release will have copies of the
applicable gems in our tag history, so we'll be able to troubleshoot
exact combinations of our code and the dependencies we used over
time.  In theory, at least. :)

I haven't figured out, though, how to most cleanly update frozen gems
w/r/to the version control repository (svn, in our case).  What's the
best way to update the gems if, say, you want to go from a set of
frozen gems from rails-1.1.6 to a new set for rails-1.2.2?

So far I've just svn rm'd the existing gems, then refroze, and then
svn add'ed the new frozen gems again.  This is rather ugly, though,
since moving so many files into and out of svn creates a goodly
amount of noise, and the occasionally awkward svn update, especially
since we're ultimately needing to merge changes like this on a branch
up to a trunk and so forth.

Is there a better technique for doing this in svn, or for gems, or in
rails already?  How do you deal with this in your apps?

Many thanks for any advice, -Dan