While I agree with you, I don't think PEAR/PECL a good exemple. Even with a good Gemfile if the libxml2-dev is not installed you will not be able to bundle your Rails app which use Nokogiri.
Where the argument of PHP run on any cheap shared hosting fail for me is more about the php.ini config. You can't rely only on the PHP version to know if your app will run.
Where the argument of PHP run on any cheap shared hosting fail for me is more about the php.ini config. You can't rely only on the PHP version to know if your app will run.