From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-02-09T05:22:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby as a configuration language

On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 01:00:09AM +0900, Tapio Kelloniemi wrote:
> # 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

I did something a bit like this, using Rake, for building mail software. You
can download the source, which is basically just a bunch of package building
scripts, from http://linnet.rubyforge.org/ (take the linnet-src package, or
check out from cvs)

You might be able to steal some ideas. It's not as abstracted as the way
you've described above, but I found in practice that the software packages I
was building didn't all fit into identical moulds.