Rake as a library/API: possible?

[David Palm]

Hi all,
I'm trying to use rake as a library/API to retrieve the rake tasks in a given directory.

Basically I'm looking to mimic the output of
rake --tasks --silent

Looking through the source code and trying out some stuff in irb I'm getting the impression this usage was not considered at design stage. But is it possible?
...throws me out of IRB, as does "Rake::Application.new.run"

I've been trying for a good while to get around the above all to no avail.

Can this be done? Am I better off by just doing:
tasks = x%{rake --tasks --silent}

Thanks!
David

 

[Ryan Davis]

Looking through the source code and trying out some stuff in irb I'm
getting the impression this usage was not considered at design
stage. But is it possible?

...throws me out of IRB, as does "Rake::Application.new.run"

I think the biggie is that Rake::Application is a singleton.

% ruby -rubygems -e 'require "rake"; load "Rakefile"; p
Rake.application.tasks.map { |t| t.name }.sort'
["announce", "audit", "autotest", "check_extra_deps",
"check_manifest", "clean", "clobber", "clobber_docs",
"clobber_package", "clobber_rcov", "config_hoe", "debug_gem",
"default", "deps:email", "deps:fetch", "deps:list", "doc", "doc/
index.html", "docs", "email", "flay", "flog", "gem", "generate_key",
"install_gem", "multi", "package", "pkg", "pkg/ZenTest-4.0.0", "pkg/
ZenTest-4.0.0.gem", "pkg/ZenTest-4.0.0.tgz", "post_blog", "post_news",
"publish_docs", "publish_on_announce", "rcov", "rcov_info",
"rcov_overlay", "redocs", "release", "repackage", "ridocs", "sort",
"test", "test_deps", "update"]