Creator/maintainer of vagrant-wrapper here. The wrapper was created with Chef cookbook testing as the original use-case. It is designed to access to any version of vagrant that may be installed, but more specifically to ensure that if both the newer packaged version of vagrant and the older gem version are both installed, the newer version will take precedence (unless the older is specifically requested in the Gemfile).

Internally we found that it was a great headache that if one used a Gemfile, and the vagrant gem was installed, it was difficult to get the system-installed version of vagrant to take precedence, even if vagrant was specifically excluded from the Gemfile. One would typically have to remove the vagrant Gem to get Chef to route to the packaged version. Of course if another project reinstalled the vagrant gem then that would adversely affect a cookbook project later on.

Requiring the removal of a gem seemed an unacceptable burden, hence vagrant-wrapper, which removes that need and allows for the peaceful cohabitation of both the packaged version and the gem version of vagrant … with the packaged version the preferred command-line binary when the wrapper is included via the Gemfile.

We have received positive feedback from Vagrant's creator, [https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/336192570424184832].

The wrapper is designed to be transparent, it can work with just the packaged version, or just the gem version. It shouldn't interfere but rather implies a precedence for the packaged version if available. In other words, it shouldn't hurt anything, and requiring this Gem is much more user-friendly than asking someone to manually remove the vagrant gem when a conflict arises.

@fugin 's comment regarding edge-cases is of course valid. That being said Vagrant is a big part of test-kitchen, and the changeover from Gem to packaged versions of Vagrant was significant. I cannot comment on what is best for this project, but vagrant-wrapper is an integration/test requirement for the cookbooks we publish publicly, it was designed for that purpose, and we have the utmost deference and support for the Chef community. We'd welcome the opportunity for greater usage within the Chef official cookbooks.