From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2003-11-29T18:37:11+09:00
Subject: Re: rake task library

Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> wrote:
> On Saturday, November 29, 2003, 6:02:10 PM, Martin wrote:
> 
>> Is there any effort underway to compile a rake task library, the way ant
>> does?
> 
> Rake has a few tasks built in and a "secondary" area where new tasks
> are tried out.
> 
> What exactly do you mean - plugins?

See http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html - it allows a lot of common
tasks to be written declaratively. For instance we could have an
installer package generated by saying

make-installer (
  :src => src_dir,
  :lib => lib_dir,
  :doc => doc_dir,
  :installer => 'install.rb'
)

The make-installer method might be complicated, and involve all sorts of
corner cases and tests, but once it's written using it is trivial. Not
so much plugins as a library of common tasks, one to a method, and a
central site where they're maintained.

martin