From: James Britt <james.britt@...>
Date: 2007-01-16T08:49:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Q: How can a Rake task know the caller's directory?

Mike Harris wrote:
> James Britt wrote:
>
>> E.g., if I'm in /home/james/foo/bar, and the nearest Rakefile is in 
>> /home/james, with task :whereami, and I call
>>
>>  $ rake whereami
>>
>> what does :whereami have to do to return '/home/james/foo/bar' ?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
> Modify rake to log the initial working directory before doing anything 
> else.  You could do this by putting the line to log the dir in the file 
> bin/rake.  Take advantage of ruby's openness.

I've hacked ruby apps in this manner before, but they are prone to "gem 
update <name_of_gem>" stomping.

So any mods to rake itself have to happen via by a plugin that will 
survive library updates.

> 
> Alternatively, you could put a file in a dir on your PATH (let's say 
> rake2) to log the dir and then delegate to rake, and just call rake2 
> instead of rake from the command line.
> 

Too hackish, even for me.  I'd rather see about a cleaner way for any 
arbitrary rake task to know the initial calling directory.

-- 
James Britt

"I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion
out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be
solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!"
  - Edsger Dijkstra