Thanks for the link to Rake-Me. I was looking for that when I wrote this post, but couldn’t find it. I’m updating the post to include that in the list at the top.

The reason I decided to go down the route of creating the rake tasklibs, was to be a bit more “professional” in my approach to the problem. The truth is, the task lib is just a simple adapter pattern – it takes the real object model that sits behind the scenes and exposes it to rake directly through a custom rake task. If you take a look at the MSBuildTask or the AssemblyInfoTask in Albacore, you won’t see very much code, because all the real work is done in the object model.

I also found myself in need for a couple of Rake tasks when we migrated our far-too-complex NAnt scripts to Rake. I didn’t go down the TaskLib route like you did because I basically never saw a need to have (and use) a TaskLib when classes would achieve the same result. But maybe I am just missing the point about TaskLibs. Great to see some tests in Albacore as that’s something that I wasn’t able to look into.

Anyway, you might want to have a look at “rake-me” which contains a host of Rake tasks that you might require in the future.
http://github.com/agross/rake-me

Alex

too late, man. I spent some time with Ruby on Rails during a couple days training w/ Scott Bellware… a day later, I looked at some asp.net mvc code and about puked. :)

I am a troll.

well it turns out it already works without specifying ‘lib’… i just installed the gem, and ran a test rake file that only specified: require ‘albacore’… worked fine! I’ve updated this post to correct the require statement.

ya – i got that feeling from examining my use of other rake tasks… had a hard time figuring out how to make that work… I’ll definitely look into it more, though.

It’s likely a bit more “rakish” to structure the gem so that “lib” is not necessary when requiring Albacore. It’s usually more idiomatic to do something simpler like: require ‘albacore’