Rake 0.9.3 Released

Rake version 0.9.3 contains some new, backwards compatible features and a number of bug fixes.

Changes

New Features

• Multitask tasks now use a thread pool. Use -j to limit the number of available threads.

• Use -m to turn regular tasks into multitasks (use at your own risk).

• You can now do “Rake.add_rakelib 'dir'” in your Rakefile to programatically add rake task libraries.

• You can specific backtrace suppression patterns (see –supress-backtrace)

• Directory tasks can now take prerequisites and actions

• Use –backtrace to request a full backtrace without the task trace.

• You can say “–backtrace=stdout” and “–trace=stdout” to route trace output to standard output rather than standard error.

• Optional 'phony' target (enable with 'require 'rake/phony'“) for special purpose builds.

• Task#clear now clears task comments as well as actions and prerequisites. Task#clear_comment will specifically target comments.

• The –all option will force -T and -D to consider all the tasks, with and without descriptions.

Bug Fixes

• Semi-colons in windows rakefile paths now work.

• Improved Control-C support when invoking multiple test suites.

• egrep method now reads files in text mode (better support for Windows)

• Better deprecation line number reporting.

• The -W option now works with all tasks, whether they have a description or not.

• File globs in rake should not be sorted alphabetically, independent of file system and platform.

• Numerous internal improvements.

• Documentation typos and fixes.

What is Rake

Rake is a build tool similar to the make program in many ways. But instead of cryptic make recipes, Rake uses standard Ruby code to declare tasks and dependencies. You have the full power of a modern scripting language built right into your build tool.

Availability

The easiest way to get and install rake is via RubyGems …

gem install rake    (you may need root/admin privileges)

Otherwise, you can get it from the more traditional places:

Home Page

github.com/jimweirich/rake

Download

rubyforge.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=50

GitHub

git://github.com/jimweirich/rake.git

Thanks

As usual, it was input from users that drove a alot of these changes. The following people either contributed patches, made suggestions or made otherwise helpful comments. Thanks to …

• Aaron Patterson

• Dylan Smith

• Jo Liss

• Jonas Pfenniger

• Kazuki Tsujimoto

• Michael Bishop

• Michael Elufimov

• NAKAMURA Usaku

• Ryan Davis

• Sam Grönblom

• Sam Phippen

• Sergio Wong

• Tay Ray Chuan

• grosser

• quix

Also, many thanks to Eric Hodel for assisting with getting this release out the door.

– Jim Weirich