rake manifest considered extremely dangerous!

[rhubarb]

So I'm about to try my first gem creation on my project managed with
newgem 1.2.3, and I decided I'd better update the manifest first.

rake -t tells me:

rake manifest # Recreate Manifest.txt to include ALL files

yep that's what I want. But what does rake manifest actually go and
do?!
Here's the output:
--------------------------------------------
/Users/rhubarb/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/
gempackagetask.rb:13:Warning: Gem::manage_gems is deprecated and will
be removed on or after March 2009.
/Ruby/projects/myapp/lib/myapp.rb:9: warning: already initialized
constant VERSION
/Users/rhubarb/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/
gempackagetask.rb:13:Warning: Gem::manage_gems is deprecated and will
be removed on or after March 2009.
/Ruby/projects/myapp/lib/myapp.rb:9: warning: already initialized
constant VERSION
rm -r doc
rm -r pkg
rm -rf tmp
rm -rf foo.log
exclude entry missing from .hoerc. Aborting.
patch: **** Only garbage was found in the patch input.
----------------------------------------------

Okay so problems in order of escalating ability to induce panic,
followed by fear and loathing:

1. "manage_gems is deprecated." Is that a problem?
2. "already initialized constant" Just a warning, but why is it
loading my ruby file anyway?
3. "missing entry from .hoerc." Huh? What do I need to put in .hoerc?
Why is this not mentioned on the website? Or is it and am I being
dense? "Aborting" - what? why?
4. "Only garbage was found in the patch input" - what patch input?
What garbage? why?
5. Manifest.txt is now empty.
6. rm -rf tmp - wtf.

I repeat, and use allcaps to add unnecessary emphasis: W T F!?
According rake -t this command is going to _modify a single text
file_. So why the *%!#@! is it deleting my tmp directory my log file
and anything else it doesn't feel sympathetic about.
I mean, c'mon dude, I _had_ stuff I cared about in that tmp directory.
"rm -fr" with no warning. Puhlease.

What gives Dr Nic?

[rhubarb]

The thot plickens.

Well somewhat: I'm reading Rakefile - the one that newgem created and
the one that gets executed first when you run rake anything, and I see
this:

p.clean_globs |= %w[**/.DS_Store tmp *.log]

So that at least tells me that there was some method to the madness of
wiping my files unannounced: at least its specified somewhere
that .log and tmp files can be "cleaned". Still not good since rake -T
never warned me it would be taking me to the cleaners.

Also I see from the top of Rakefile that it requires my main
project.rb file which explains why it's being loaded - though not
_why_ it's being loaded. Presumably to get the VERSION that's defined
in it by default.

Still working - I'm now trying to find out where that Manifest rake
task is coming from since Hoe only seems to define check_manifest.

[rhubarb]

Having my own little conversation with myself here. So anyway I looked
in the code of newgem and there in deployment.rake is the definition
of the manifest task

task :manifest do
`rake check_manifest | patch -p0 > Manifest.txt`
end

so it just runs the hoe task "check_manifest" which generates a diff
output comparing the current directory structure (filtered by the
exclude list in my .hoerc file which previously didn't exist and was
the cause of the error message in problem #3 above)
This is a standard diff output with lines like
+thiswasadded
-thatwasdeleted
which can be read by humans like us but which also doubles as edit
instructions for programmatically generating one compared file from
the other and which can in turn be fed into a program like, say, I
dunno, "patch", which will then use the commands to make the changes.
Hence newgem's "| patch -p0 > Manifest.txt"
which basically takes the from check_manifest the edit commands needed
to turn the current contents of Manifest.txt into the current
directory structure and actually applies them and overwrites
Manifest.txt.

So what about the evil 'rm -fr'? Well Hoe is doing that. I guess it
figures if it's going to do a check_manifest to compare with the
current directory structure it should clean the junk out of the
current directory structure first. So it runs the clean task first.
Still evil since there's no warning.

I suggest Dr Nic that you might want to update the task description
for manifest to warn that it will also (by way of hoe admittedly)
clean anything that happens to be defined in the clean_glob in the
autogenerated Rake file.
Another alternative would be to leave the clean_glob empty by default,
but hoe still deletes stuff.