[Ruby] hoe and Manifest.txt

[James Moore]

> -----Original Message-----
> manifest 2 |?møn?'f?st| |?man?f?st|
> noun
> a document giving comprehensive details of a ship and its cargo and
> other contents, passengers, and crew for the use of customs officers.
> • a list of passengers or cargo in an aircraft.
> • a list of the cars forming a freight train.
> 
> In other words, a list of contents used to verify what should and
> should not be on board. Among other things, this makes it easy to
> verify that an individual is or is not a stowaway and should or
> should not be on the ship. This is a Good Thing and really must have
> human eyeballs on it to verify that the contents are correct.

(caveat - I'm not yet using hoe)

That's a different operation than the generation of the manifest, though.
No human being is involved in generating the manifest for any of those
operations any more; there's a set of rules that determines what goes on the
manifest, and then it may (or may not, depending on the level of
automation/taskload on the customs agents/etc) be reviewed by humans.  For
example, I've heard that the consist (the list of railcars on a train) isn't
checked by a human very often any more - people like
http://www.aps-technology.com/main/?cat=solutions&pg=intermodal are
automating that.

Perhaps a tool to extract all files/directories with something like a
subversion property of hoe:manifest/hoe:no_manifest and use that list to
generate Manifest.txt?  

Or probably better to use something that isn't hoe:*; the propery has
general meaning, so there's no reason to make it hoe-specific.

(Substitute your CM flavor of choice for svn, of course.)

Most projects I've been involved with have a set of rules for which files to
be released that generate the manifest.  It's not something built by hand.
Definitely reviewed, but not built, and when you find something wrong with
the manifest you fix the rules not the manifest itself.  

I agree, though, that it would be difficult if not impossible to create a
general ruleset to identify files that would go in a manifest; this is going
to be very project-specific, and it may be that hoe is a consumer of the
manifest created by a different tool.

 - James Moore