# State of the art in setup.rb land?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/state-of-the-art-in-setup-rb-land/118374>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [October 26, 2007, 8:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/state-of-the-art-in-setup-rb-land/118374 "2007-10-26T08:23:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![kelleysislander](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/f6c823/32.png) [@kelleysislander](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/kelleysislander)\
**Post date:** [October 26, 2007, 8:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/state-of-the-art-in-setup-rb-land/118374/1 "2007-10-26T08:23:26Z")

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Greetings,

I’ve been a little slow to hitch onto the ‘gem’ and ‘rake’  
train, but I’m creating a new ruby C extension I’d like to  
release as a gem.

The tools I’m familiar with are mkmf.rb and setup.rb.

I’ve gotten the sense that mkmf.rb may still be used, but  
that setup.rb may have been replaced by some more powerful  
rake-based automatic gem building solution?

Anyway, any tips, hints, or links would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Bill

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kelleysislander](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/f6c823/32.png) [@kelleysislander](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/kelleysislander)\
**Post date:** [October 26, 2007, 8:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/state-of-the-art-in-setup-rb-land/118374/2 "2007-10-26T08:34:34Z")

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On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 03:22:32PM +0900, Bill K. wrote:

> rake-based automatic gem building solution?
> 
> Anyway, any tips, hints, or links would be appreciated!

Check out hoe! It lets you create rake files which will build your  
gems, post to rubyforge, and other fun stuff. Just make sure you’ve got  
an extconf.rb in your ext directory.

[http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/hoe/](http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/hoe/)

If you want to see a working example, my icanhasaudio gem is a native  
extension that uses hoe.