Wouldn't this be better as a new lightweight generator for the existing rails project? i.e.
$ rails new api
instead of
$ rails new
My concern is that rails-api will diverge from rails and I'll be stuck having to decide which is the easiest starting point where I want features from both.
This is not a fork of Rails, it's just a set of plugins that work together nicely. Luckily, all the work on Rails 3 means that Rails is super modular, and it's easy to break off just the bits that you want. See Crafting Rails Applications[1] for more on this topic.
$ rails new api
instead of
$ rails new
My concern is that rails-api will diverge from rails and I'll be stuck having to decide which is the easiest starting point where I want features from both.