From: Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@...>
Date: 2005-08-29T21:45:40+09:00
Subject: Re: beaten to the punch, and a request

pat eyler <pat.eyler@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm wrapping up a tutorial on Rake for IBM (but probably won't be published
> for 2-3 months), and I wanted to make a request to the community.  Does 
> anyone have an interesting, useful rake task or rule they'd be interested in
> sharing?   I'd like to include a short cookbook at the end of the article with
> some example code and explanations.  You'll get credit in the text if I end up
> using your code (or build something based on it).  You can respond to me off
> list if you like, but it might make for an interesting discussion here.

I made Rake package my software with help from darcs:

  PROJECT = "mycoolapp"

  desc "Do predistribution stuff"
  task :predist => [:chmod, :changelog, :doc]
  
  desc "Make an archive as .tar.gz"
  task :dist => :test do
    system "export DARCS_REPO=#{File.expand_path "."}; " +
           "darcs dist -d #{PROJECT}#{get_darcs_tree_version}"
  end
  
  desc "Make binaries executable"
  task :chmod do
    Dir["bin/*"].each { |binary| File.chmod(0775, binary) }
  end
  
  desc "Generate a ChangeLog"
  task :changelog do
    system "darcs changes --repo=#{ENV["DARCS_REPO"] || "."} >ChangeLog"
  end
  
  # Helper to retrieve the "revision number" of the darcs tree.
  def get_darcs_tree_version
    return ""  unless File.directory? "_darcs"
  
    changes = `darcs changes`
    count = 0
    tag = "0.0"
    
    changes.each("\n\n") { |change|
      head, title, desc = change.split("\n", 3)
      
      if title =~ /^  \*/
        # Normal change.
        count += 1
      elsif title =~ /tagged (.*)/
        # Tag.  We look for these.
        tag = $1
        break
      else
        warn "Unparsable change: #{change}"
      end
    }
  
    "-#{tag}.#{count}"
  end

I set the darcs preferences to call "rake predist" after checking out,
so I can just run "rake dist" and quickly get a packaged version of my
project, named after the last tag (I use version numbers for those,
0.1, 0.2 etc.) and the number of patches following it; it includes
rdoc HTML, a Changelog and has permissions set right.

Nothing revolutionary, but very useful.

> thanks,
> -pate
-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen@gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org