The biggest change is that FileList are now "load on demand". When you define a file list, e.g.

   PKGFILES = FileList['**/*.rb', 'test/*']
   PKGFILES.exclude(/^temp/)

The file list just records the include and exclude patterns. Later, when you do …

  PKGFILES.each { |filename| ... }

the file list will actually go out and read the file system to find the matching files. The thought is that searching the file system is a rather expensive operation and if you never actually use the file list, then it is wasted time. By building the file list only when it is needed will make rake startup time a bit faster.

If you are having trouble starting with rake, I wrote up a QuickStartExample showing off some of the features of rake.

What is Rake?

Rake is a make-like utility written entirely in Ruby. It allows to you specify build target and actions, with the action being standard Ruby code.

Download

You can get Rake from rubyforge. If you have rubygems installed, then all you need to do is …

  gem -i rake

If you have a very recent version of rubygems (i.e. from CVS), then the —gen-rdoc option finally produces a decent rendition of the Rake documentation locally.