I would like to move that my long-standing branch `interactive-shell` and its support branch `jruby-system` (both available from git:// github.com/djspiewak/buildr.git) be rebased onto trunk/ and merged into the mainline Buildr SVN. I have been dogfooding this feature for about six months now and have found it invaluable on many occasions. I decided against just "going ahead" with the merge without discussion since there was some controversy the last time we talked about this particular feature. Specifically, Assaf was of the opinion that the `shell` task should open a shell which is global to the entire project structure, whereas I wanted to make `shell` a local_task (as it is implemented in my branch).
There is also a rather ugly hack that I had to add to get around a restriction in JRuby. Specifically, I overwrote Rake's FileUtils.sh method. This doesn't seem to have caused any ill effects, even though I'm technically stubbing part of the API (exitstatus and pid). The only problem I'm having here is it seems to have broken shell launch (but not anything else) under MRI. Considering the fact that my hack only applies when running under JRuby, I'm not sure how this could be. If someone more knowledgable in the dark arts of Rake could take a look, I would greatly appreciate it (just run `buildr shell` in a Scala project under MRI). The main glaring omission from this contribution is specs. I can't for the life of me figure out how to spec something like this, so I've settled for just manually testing the heck out of it. A poor substitute, but it's all I've got. If someone has any better ideas, I'm definitely open. Anyway, there has been some interest from the community in this particular feature, and given its usefulness in my own development, I think that it's worthy of inclusion in trunk/. Any thoughts? Daniel
