From: Tapio Kelloniemi <no@...>
Date: 2007-02-09T01:00:09+09:00
Subject: Ruby as a configuration language

Hi

I'm writing an automated software building framework in Ruby. The software 
compiles software packages from source code using human-written profiles. The 
profiles should be extremely easy to read and write by humans (and easy to 
parse by a program). I wish I could write the profiles in Ruby to avoid 
creating yet another advanced configuration language. But... it seems that I 
might not be able to do that. What I want is something like this:

# An example package description file. The actual building commands are
# written in a bash script.
name = "gcc"
version = "4.1.1"
title = " "GNU Compiler Collection"
description = "..."

archive {
    localname = "#{name}-#{version}.tar.bz2"
    originalname = "#{name}-#{version}.tar.gz"
    baseurl "ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/#{version}/"
    baseurl "ftp.mirror.site/gnu/gcc/#{version}/"
    convert = "gz-bz2"
}

# Optional components
feature "gfortran" {
    title = "Fortran compiler"
    depend "gmp"
}

### END example

So my question is: is there a way to do this so that I would eval this package 
description file and appropriate fields  of internal objects would be filled 
by the evaluated script?

Thanks in advance!

-- 
Tapio