At some point my installation of capistrano here in OSX got corrupted or something.  Either way, whenever I would try to run `cap deploy`, on a project that everyone else could deploy just fine, I’d get an error message like this:

Brians-Laptop-2:railsapp brian$ cap deploy

/opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:636:in `report_activate_error':
RubyGem version error: capistrano(2.5.5 not = 1.4.2) (Gem::LoadError)

Which was weird for a couple reasons.  One, the capistrano gem that was frozen into the rails project was specified to be 2.5.3.  Capistrano 2.5.5 (which this was saying I had activated) should have run just fine that way.  But then second, where was this 1.4.2 mention coming from?  Nothing in the project talked about capistrano 1.4.2.

So, taking a look at my installed gems, it gets even more fun.

Brians-Laptop-2:railsapp brian$ gem list | grep capistrano

capistrano (2.5.5)

Well, lets just uninstall that sucker.

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)

   Unknown gem capistrano >= 0

Wooo fun.  Gem list says I have it, gem uninstall says I don’t.  Anyway, finally figured out that at some point capistrano had been installed to my home directory.  Something like ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano/blahblahblah.  Thats the one it was somehow using.  So, delete/move that .gem directory.

Then if you actually look at the stack trace from the original `cap deploy` command, you’ll also notice something similar:

from /Users/brian/.caprc:1:in `load'

Well I don’t know wtf this .caprc file is doing in my home directory either, but get rid of that too.  Finally, there, I was able to `sudo gem install capistrano` and correctly install capistrano ( 2.5.5 ) to its correct location.  From that point, cap deploys should work just fine.

Hope this helps anyone else googling around for the same arcane set of keywords I was.