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-= Why rake?
-
-Ok, let me state from the beginning that I never intended to write this
-code.  I'm not convinced it is useful, and I'm not convinced anyone
-would even be interested in it.  All I can say is that Why's onion truck
-must by been passing through the Ohio valley.
-
-What am I talking about? ... A Ruby version of Make.
-
-See, I can sense you cringing already, and I agree.  The world certainly
-doesn't need yet another reworking of the "make" program.  I mean, we
-already have "ant".  Isn't that enough?
-
-It started yesterday.  I was helping a coworker fix a problem in one of
-the Makefiles we use in our project.  Not a particularly tough problem,
-but during the course of the conversation I began lamenting some of the
-shortcomings of make.  In particular, in one of my makefiles I wanted to
-determine the name of a file dynamically and had to resort to some
-simple scripting (in Ruby) to make it work.  "Wouldn't it be nice if you
-could just use Ruby inside a Makefile" I said.
-
-My coworker (a recent convert to Ruby) agreed, but wondered what it
-would look like.  So I sketched the following on the whiteboard...
-
-    "What if you could specify the make tasks in Ruby, like this ..."
-
-      task "build" do
-        java_compile(...args, etc ...)
-      end
-
-    "The task function would register "build" as a target to be made,
-    and the block would be the action executed whenever the build
-    system determined that it was time to do the build target."
-
-We agreed that would be cool, but writing make from scratch would be WAY
-too much work.  And that was the end of that!
-
-... Except I couldn't get the thought out of my head.  What exactly
-would be needed to make the about syntax work as a make file?  Hmmm, you
-would need to register the tasks, you need some way of specifying
-dependencies between tasks, and some way of kicking off the process.
-Hey!  What if we did ... and fifteen minutes later I had a working
-prototype of Ruby make, complete with dependencies and actions.
-
-I showed the code to my coworker and we had a good laugh.  It was just
-about a page worth of code that reproduced an amazing amount of the
-functionality of make.  We were both truly stunned with the power of
-Ruby.
-
-But it didn't do everything make did.  In particular, it didn't have
-timestamp based file dependencies (where a file is rebuilt if any of its
-prerequisite files have a later timestamp).  Obviously THAT would be a
-pain to add and so Ruby Make would remain an interesting experiment.
-
-... Except as I walked back to my desk, I started thinking about what
-file based dependencies would really need.  Rats!  I was hooked again,
-and by adding a new class and two new methods, file/timestamp
-dependencies were implemented.
-
-Ok, now I was really hooked.  Last night (during CSI!) I massaged the
-code and cleaned it up a bit.  The result is a bare-bones replacement
-for make in exactly 100 lines of code.
-
-For the curious, you can see it at ...
-* doc/proto_rake.rdoc
-
-Oh, about the name.  When I wrote the example Ruby Make task on my
-whiteboard, my coworker exclaimed "Oh! I have the perfect name: Rake ...
-Get it?  Ruby-Make. Rake!"  He said he envisioned the tasks as leaves
-and Rake would clean them up  ... or something like that.  Anyways, the
-name stuck.
-
-Some quick examples ...
-
-A simple task to delete backup files ...
-
-   task :clean do
-     Dir['*~'].each {|fn| rm fn rescue nil}
-   end
-
-Note that task names are symbols (they are slightly easier to type
-than quoted strings ... but you may use quoted string if you would
-rather). Rake makes the methods of the FileUtils module directly
-available, so we take advantage of the <tt>rm</tt> command.  Also note
-the use of "rescue nil" to trap and ignore errors in the <tt>rm</tt>
-command.
-
-To run it, just type "rake clean".  Rake will automatically find a
-Rakefile in the current directory (or above!) and will invoke the
-targets named on the command line.  If there are no targets explicitly
-named, rake will invoke the task "default".
-
-Here's another task with dependencies ...
-
-   task :clobber => [:clean] do
-     rm_r "tempdir"
-   end
-
-Task :clobber depends upon task :clean, so :clean will be run before
-:clobber is executed.
-
-Files are specified by using the "file" command.  It is similar to the
-task command, except that the task name represents a file, and the task
-will be run only if the file doesn't exist, or if its modification time
-is earlier than any of its prerequisites.
-
-Here is a file based dependency that will compile "hello.cc" to
-"hello.o".
-
-   file "hello.cc"
-   file "hello.o" => ["hello.cc"] do |t|
-     srcfile = t.name.sub(/\.o$/, ".cc")
-     sh %{g++ #{srcfile} -c -o #{t.name}}
-   end
-
-I normally specify file tasks with string (rather than symbols).  Some
-file names can't be represented by symbols.  Plus it makes the
-distinction between them more clear to the casual reader.
-
-Currently writing a task for each and every file in the project would be
-tedious at best.  I envision a set of libraries to make this job
-easier.  For instance, perhaps something like this ...
-
-   require 'rake/ctools'
-   Dir['*.c'].each do |fn|
-     c_source_file(fn)
-   end
-
-where "c_source_file" will create all the tasks need to compile all the
-C source files in a directory.  Any number of useful libraries could be
-created for rake.
-
-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 exercise and a tribute to the power of Ruby.
-
-Why /might/ rake be interesting to Ruby programmers.  I don't know,
-perhaps ...
-
-* No weird make syntax (only weird Ruby syntax :-)
-* No need to edit or read XML (a la ant)
-* Platform independent build scripts.
-* 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.
-
-So ... Sorry for the long rambling message.  Like I said, I never
-intended to write this code at all.