Marc, if you use the app template you'll have a ready-to-run app as soon as "rails new ..." is done. Submit a GitHub issue [1] if it doesn't work; I'll take a look as soon as I can. You can also clone the repo and use that as your reference implementation. Hundreds of Rails developers have used the app; usually any issues are resolved quickly.
Thanks for reaching out to me Daniel. What do you mean by 'ready-to-run' app? Is it fair to have my expectations that I laid out - i.e. with say an admin & user already created, and maybe one or two authorization rules set up?
Or is that fanciful thinking?
I guess the issue is just a disconnect between what I perceive as this particular template being able to do (based on my impressions from the docs) - and what it actually does.
[1] https://github.com/RailsApps/rails3-bootstrap-devise-cancan/...