[Rake-devel] hello

[Jim Weirich]

Martin DeMello wrote:

>Between jobs, thought I'd use the free time productively and get involved in
>rake development :) My 'make' experience has been pretty basic; I've a bit more
>experience with ant. Which is rake aiming to be closer to?
>  
>
Hi Martin.

My view on Rake is that it is somewhere between Make and Ant. Make is 
great for fine grain dependencies and easy one-off scripting of actions, 
with the downside that Makefile are usually very system dependent. Ant 
is great for well understood tasks that can be provided in a task 
library, but its downside is that stepping outside of those predefined 
tasks requires a quantum jump in understanding (for example, you enter 
the realm of Java programming rather than Ant scripting).

Neither Ant nor Make are very good for tasks that require more than 
simple declarative scripts.

I see Rake spanning the chasm between Make and Ant. Rake can easily do 
fine grain dependencies with ad-hoc actions. Yet because we script in 
Ruby, we don't give up platform independence (assuming we take 
reasonable precautions). And because Ruby is a high level language, it 
is easy to provide high-level ant-like tasks without leaving our 
language of choice.

What are you interested in working on? I can make suggestions if you like.

--
-- Jim Weirich jweirich at one.net http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)