The curse of RTFM after the fact
Having jumped into rake to rebuild a build-script from msbuild, I’ve now found (er, read “bothered to read”) some “proper” rake documentation (it turns out I was too stupid to figure out the web interface to RubyDoc to stumble across the rakefile.rdoc documentation that explains rake’s capabilities) courtesy of Martin Fowler via Google while I was trying to figure out how to zip up my build output. Even though I’ve got a script that is (I reckon) pretty understandable, concise, and, well, working – it turns out I’ve reinvented the wheel a few times. That grates! Still. Live and learn – and re-rebuild at some point ;-)
To save other people the same mistake, here’re some useful things that I found:
- Ruby Core documentation - http://ruby-doc.org/core/
- Ruby StdLib documentation (which contains FileUtils for UNIX-like file commands) - http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/
- RubyZip documentation - http://rubyzip.sourceforge.net/ via http://rhnh.net/2006/05/26/packaging-with-rake
- Martin Fowler’s Using the Rake Build Language
- Rake documentation - http://rake.rubyforge.org/ – click on docs/rakefile.rdoc in the top-left frame (why does a language/stack with such a reputedly nice web-dev framework generate documentation that uses frames? How quaint!) for the actual “what can I do with rake” parts (I don’t really know why that’s not a tad more prominent)
- Jay Fields’ C# project file parser for Ruby (which will clearly be factored into my refactoring ;-) )
And here’s my updated [download#2], which now zips up the output after the unit-tests have run (since at this point, we’re still independent of things like licenses and database-server dependencies that the other tasks will require, and the cost of harvesting and zipping even when the later testing fails is not so large a waste compared to simplicity). Obviously, I haven’t yet realised that FileTask exists in rake…
