Building extensions with Hoe

Ruby
1

Hi,

I’m developing a library that includes a C extension, so during
development I need to keep re-compiling the extension before testing.

I’m using Hoe for packaging, so I’ve added the following task to my
Rakefile.rb which allows me to rebuild the extension using extconf.rb/
make. My library has a further dependency on an external C library
(libR), at the moment this is semi-hardcoded into the script by
referencing the environment variable R_HOME:

desc “Uses extconf.rb and make to build the extension”
task :build_extension do
Dir.chdir(‘ext’)
system(“ruby extconf.rb --with-R-dir=$R_HOME”)
system(“make”)
Dir.chdir(’…’)
end

Two questions (I’m pretty new with Rake/Hoe so forgive me if these
are obvious):

  1. The ‘build_extension’ task works fine, but seems a little hacky,
    how do other people build extensions with Rake/Hoe?

  2. Can I retrospectively add this task as a dependency of the ‘test’
    task, so that when I run my tests I can ensure the library is freshly
    built?

Alex G.

Bioinformatics Center
Kyoto University

2

On Jan 15, 2007, at 17:53, Alex G. wrote:

task :build_extension do
how do other people build extensions with Rake/Hoe?
RubyGems looks for both an extconf.rb and an ‘extension’ rake task.

  1. Can I retrospectively add this task as a dependency of the
    ‘test’ task, so that when I run my tests I can ensure the library
    is freshly built?

I’m not sure how to do this with rake, but we’d accept a patch to Hoe.

–
Eric H. - [email protected] - http://blog.segment7.net

I LIT YOUR GEM ON FIRE!

3

Alex G. wrote:

  1. Can I retrospectively add this task as a dependency of the ‘test’
    task, so that when I run my tests I can ensure the library is freshly
    built?
    Yes. I forget exactly, but it’s something easy like
    Rake::Task[‘test’].prerequisites << ‘build_extension’.

Devin