Add dependency support to custom rake tasks

I previously wrote about creating a NUnitTask for Rake. The NUnitTask is based on the PackageTask that comes standard with Rake. I assumed that the PackageTask would have support for adding dependencies at construction time. This turned out to be a false assumption. To add a PackageTask and dependency for that task they need to be declared separately.

Rake::PackageTask.new "foo","1.2.3" do |pkg|
  pkg.need_zip = true
  pkg.package_files.include("build_helpers/*.rb")
end
task :package => :test

I had expected it to work much like a standard task and dependency.

#this will not work
Rake::PackageTask.new "foo","1.2.3" => :init do |pkg|
  pkg.need_zip = true
  pkg.package_files.include("build_helpers/*.rb")
end

Upon discovery, I decided to alter NUnitTask to take a dependency in the expected manner. The only change required is to alter the assignment of the name variable.

def initialize(name=:nunit)
  @name = name
  ..
end

Becomes

def initialize(params=:nunit)
  @name = case params
    when Hash
      task params.keys[0] => params[params.keys[0]]
      params.keys[0]
    else
      params
  end
  ..
end

Hopefully, Jim Weirich can add the same capability to the next version of the Rake Tasks.