debian/rake: A Tale of Rubies

A while ago Rohan and I talked about the possibility of writing debian/rules in ruby rather than make. Even though this is not exactly policy compliant I was reasonably certain that this is possible, I just was not quite sure how much resistance the existing tools would give a rules file that is not written in make. So, I set out to hack up a debian/rules file using rake (a make-like build tool using ruby).