From: Stefan Lang <langstefan@...>
Date: 2005-03-26T11:08:28+09:00
Subject: [ANN] First release of Rant

From the documentation:

Rant is a flexible build tool written entirely in Ruby,
similar to Rake.

The equivalent to a Makefile for make is the Rantfile. An
Rantfile is actually a valid Ruby script that is read by the
rant command.

Rant currently features:
* Defining custom tasks
* Automated packaging, testing and RDoc generation for Ruby
  applications and libraries.
* Primitive support for compiling C# sources portably with csc, cscc
  and mcs.
* A configure plugin for easy environment and build-parameter
  checking (but not like autoconf!) which saves data in a yaml file.
* The rant-import command creates a monolithic rant script,
  so you don't depend on an rant installation anymore.

As programmers usually want to see code, here is a short and very
basic example of rant usage:

A file called Rantfile contains the code:

    file "backup/data" => "data" do |t|
        sys.cp "data", t.name
    end

Running rant in the directory of this file:

    % rant
    cp data backup/data

will ensure that the "data" file in the "backup" directory is up to
date.

== Installing Rant

You can install Rant as a RubyGem:
    % gem install -r rant

or download the package from RubyForge(http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=615)
and install with setup.rb:
	% ruby setup.rb

== Resources

Current docs:: http://make.rubyforge.org
Rubyforge page:: http://rubyforge.org/projects/make/