ANN: rake-compiler 0.2.1

["Luis Lavena" <luislavena-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

Hello Rubysts:

I'll like to introduce you rake-compiler gem version 0.2.1

rake-compiler aims to help Gem developers while dealing with Ruby C
extensions, simplifying the code and reducing the duplication.

It follows *convention over configuration* and set an standardized
structure to build and package C extensions in your gems.

This is the result of experiences dealing with several Gems that
required native extensions across platforms and different user
configurations where details like portability and clarity of code were
lacking.

http://github.com/luislavena/rake-compiler/tree/master

== Current functionality:

* One-liner to be able to compile extensions using Rake
* One-liner to be able to package native extensions into Gems.

* 3 Lines of code to be able to cross compile extensions for Windows
from Linux or OSX
* Same 3 lines of code to be able to package those extensions into
Gems for Windows.

I know 3 lines sounds a lot... but compared to current alternatives
(ala: none), 3 lines is cheap.

== How to get it

Right now it's only available at github:

  gem install luislavena-rake-compiler --source http://gems.github.com

Soon at rubyforge, both will be keep on sync.

== Integration

You can use any gem packaging and releasing tool with rake-compiler
(Hoe, Echoe, MrBones, etc). It doesn't interfere as long you can
provide a Gem::Specification to hook into the native gems generation.

== Target audience

rake-compiler is not only to generate gems for Windows. Under certain
circumstances users request binary gems for Linux since their
production servers lack the build tools available under development
environments. This solution ease the path on all these fields.

== Feedback

While there is no project page for it (yet), I encourage users send
their feedback to Ruby Installer development mailing list.

rake-compiler is a side project of One-Click Installer and attempts
reduce the gap between users across platforms.

== Thanks

Several users contributed to make this project a reality, which includes:

* Aaron Patterson from nokogiri for the simplified cross compile ruby
tasks that inspired the ones implemented in this project
* Dan Kubb from DataMapper and DataObjects for care about support of
Windows users.
* Jonathan Stott from DataMapper and DataObjects for hacking in cross
compilation into DO and playing with the workflow

Thanks to everyone for their support and feedback during the
development of this project!

-- 
Luis Lavena
AREA 17
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