From: Jean-Philippe Moal <skateinmars@...>
Date: 2008-08-18T20:53:28+09:00
Subject: Advices on Rake tasks organization

Hello,

I am using some Rake tasks for various actions (from backup to project
management) using this layout :
|-- Rakefile
|-- assets
|-- config
|   |-- YAML files
|-- lib
|   |-- parametres.rb
`-- tasks
    |-- .rake files (for each namespace)

The main Rakefile includes lib/ files and tasks/*.tasks files, define some
task-related constants (ASSETS_PATH, formatted DATE...) then use the Parametres
(I'm french :-)) class to parse the YAML files :

class Parametres
   require "yaml"
   attr_accessor :parametres

   def initialize
     configsdir = defined?(RAKE_ROOT) ? RAKE_ROOT : ENV['PWD']

     @parametres = {}
     Dir["#{configsdir}/config/*.yml"].each { |file|
       filename =  File.basename(file, '.yml')
       unless filename.match(/\.server$/)
         @parametres[ filename.to_sym ] = open(file) { |f| YAML.load(f)}
       end
     }
   end
end

I would like some feedback on this organization, as I didn't find much
information on this subject (except for rails-related tasks).

At the moment I'm using a global variable to store an instance of Parametres :
$config = Parametres.new.parametres

This seems really ugly, but I don't know what would be better. Maybe a singleton
should be used for Parametres ?


My second question is more ruby related.
In my Parametres class I'm building an instance variable @parametres with a hash
filled with the YAML config files.
So, for an ftp.yml file, I can use $config[:ftp][:login] for example.
I could i use class attributes instead ? Like this :
config = Parametres.new
config.paths[:backup_dir] #maybe even config.paths.backup_dir ?

Thanks,
Jean-Philippe Moal