Rake Tasks of Interest

The Rakefile for FXRuby incorporates extensions from Hoe and rake-compiler and so you’ll need to install those gems to be able to use the Rakefile.

What rake-compiler gives you

The rake-compiler extension provides the compile task:

rake compile

This one just compiles the extension, with the object files (the “*.o” files) dropped under a local tmp directory and the resulting shared library dropped under your local lib directory.

The rake-compiler extension also augments the standard gem-packaging task to provide for building binary (or what Luis Lavena calls “native”) gems, by typing

rake native gem

FXRuby also provides tasks for cross-compiling, see Cross Compiling FXRuby for MinGW on Linux

Custom tasks

Finally, the Rakefile has some custom tasks related to generating the SWIG wrapper code and so forth:

rake swig:swig