From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-03-15T16:24:14+09:00
Subject: Re: The onion truck strikes again ... Announcing rake

In article <1047700803.26404.123.camel@traken>,
Jim Weirich  <jweirich@one.net> wrote:
<snip>
>
>That's it.  There's no documentation (other than whats in this
>message).  Does this sound interesting to anyone?  If so, I'll continue
>to clean it up and write it up and publish it on RAA.  Otherwise, I'll
>leave it as an interesting excerise and a tribute to the power of Ruby.

Please do put it on the RAA.  I proposed that somebody do a make in Ruby a 
year or so ago...  I think this has a lot of potential.

>
>Why /might/ rake be intersting to Ruby programmers.  I don't know,
>perhaps ...
>
>   o No weird make syntax (only weird Ruby syntax :-)
>   o No need to edit or read XML (a la ant)
>   o Platform independent build scripts.
>   o Will run anywhere Ruby exists, so no need to have "make" installed.
>     If you stay away from the "sys" command and use things like
>     'ftools', you can have a perfectly platform independent
>      build script.  Also rake is only 100 lines of code, so it can
>      easily be packaged along with the rest of your code.

    o also, if it becomes quite useful, it can be a way for 'sneaking' 
Ruby into places where it isn't in use now.  This is the perfect vehicle 
for that.

>
>So ... Sorry for the long rambling message.  Like I said, I never
>intended to write this code at all.

That's probably how a lot of the best tools get created...

Phil