From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-05-28T03:34:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Recipients of Google Summer of Code awards

Kevin Clark wrote:
> Hi guys,
> I'm Kevin. I haven't been active on ruby-talk in the past, but you might 
> know me from my blog, http://glu.ttono.us.
> 
> Anyway, mkmf is a pain. It's ugly and can't be reused easily. I want to 
> write the equivalent for Rake in a clean, well tested, modular fashion 
> so that it can be reused by other projects like RubyGems.
> 
> Since it will use rake instead of make, longer term goals include adding 
> support for generating RDoc.
> 
> I could use suggestions for what people want out of this. What do you 
> hate about mkmf? What do you like about it? What sort of things could be 
> improved?

I'd be happy just to have mkmf not pollute the global space, so it can
be called cleanly from code generators (without using a subprocess).

Going to rake sounds like the right thing to do, but it will require
that rake be installed before you can build extensions. Will rake soon
become part of ruby?

Also, does rake have good enough makedepend functionality yet? ISTR it
does, but that could be an issue...

-- 
      vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407