From: Bret Pettichord <bpettichord@...>
Date: 2007-04-11T02:35:09+09:00
Subject: Ruby Gem Creates Broken Batch File for Rake

Recently I have been integrating Rake with Nant. Specifically, I have
been creating Nant tasks that trigger Rake. In the process of doing
this, I have run into a problem: namely when Rake fails, Nant thinks
that it succeeds. I have tracked down the problem to the Rake batch
file, apparently created by the Gem system, that is used to invoke
Rake.

The problem is that the return code (which is 1, failure) returned
from the
Ruby process is not propagated by the Rake batch file. Nant thus sees
a return code of 0 (success). I have worked around this problem by not
using the Rake batch file and invoking ruby.exe directly. However, it
seems to me that others may also run into this problem, and also that
the Gem batch file generation system could be fixed. I suspect this
problem could also affect other gems besides Rake.

Here is my original Nant task, which did not correctly report Rake
failures:

	<property name="rake" value="C:\ruby\bin\rake.bat" />
	<target name="_ui-tests">
		<exec program="${rake}" workingdir="${watir-tests.dir}"
verbose="true">
			<arg value="ci:setup:testunit" />
			<arg value="test" />
		</exec>
	</target>

Here is my corrected Nant task:

	<property name="ruby" value="C:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe" />
	<property name="rake" value="C:\ruby\bin\rake.bat" />
	<target name="_ui-tests">
		<exec program="${ruby}" workingdir="${watir-tests.dir}"
verbose="true">
			<arg value="-x" />
			<arg value="${rake}" />
			<arg value="ci:setup:testunit" />
			<arg value="test" />
		</exec>
	</target>

Here is some information from CC.Net (which I am also using) that I
used to help debug return codes (aka error levels) on Windows:

  http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/FAQ
  See "CruiseControl.NET is reporting that the build succeeded when it
  failed. Why?"

A collegue suggested that I directly modify the batch file, but since
it seems to be autogenerated by Rake, and it doesn't seem to actually
be doing very much (I turned "@echo on" to see what it was doing), I
figured it would be easier to simply avoid using it.

I would appreciate comments and alternate suggestions.

Bret

Bret Pettichord, www.pettichord.com
Lead Developer, Watir, http://wtr.rubyforge.org
Test Architect, Dovetail, www.dovetailsoftware.com