Re: Gee, why is THAT not a surprise...
It is not like you know the author of the project or anything. ;-)
Well, I couldn't let the topic pass without some comment :)
Could you give a comparison to [link|http://www.scons.org/|http://www.scons.org/]?
Sure, just keep in mind that I am not a regular scons user and am only going by what I read on their site.
In some ways rake and scons are similar in that they are both built on top of a full power scripting language. If you have some complex need in your build system, you don't have to drop out of the build language to access it. Scons is built on Python, rake is built on Ruby.
Where they differ is in their area of emphasis. Scons provides lots of pre-defined builders for constructing programs of various shapes and sizes (C, C++, Java, etc). Making an scons build script is a matter of specifying some predefined targets and letting scons take care of the details. You can define your own builders in scons, but they don't even cover that until the last quarter of the manual.
Rake is less ambitious. It makes defining dependencies and actions very simple and straightforward. Rakefile tend to be more ad hoc (than what I am guessing a typical scons script would be).
Perhaps this is a fair statment: Rake is like make without the funky tab syntax. Scons is like a non-Java-centric ant without the funky XML.
--
-- Jim Weirich jim@weirichhouse.org [link|http://onestepback.org|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)
