Being a project developer, maintainer or both is not easy every day when you want to automate some tasks. Ian and Jeff Shell have been blogging about that topic lately.
I agree that some extend distutils can provide some solutions, I never used Ruby's Rake tool so I won't try to compare what we can do with both of these frameworks :) But one tool we daily use at work these days is MOAP. From the website:
moap is a swiss army knife for project maintainers and developers.
It aims to help in keeping you in the flow of maintaining, developing
and releasing, automating whatever tasks can be automated.
Isn't that what you're looking for guys? This is an awesome piece of Python code, easily extendable by adding new commands (ala distutils). Thomas and the other code monkeys at Fluendo use it in projects like GStreamer, Flumotion and I plan to use it soon in Elisa as well :)
Here's a little list of the nice features implemented so far:
Changelog entry generation (forget cl.pl)
DOAP file management to keep track of each release informations
auto announce releases by mail
Trac support (list bugs fixed during milestone development)
bash completion of commands for the lazy guy like you and me
some others I'm forgetting
Some cool features moap could provide:
auto upload of new release to website
create a new news entry on the project's website (if website has some API for that, like XML-RPC)
So, developers and project maintainers: please give that project a go. From what I've seen it's quite easy to hack new features there, so I might get my hands in soonish :)
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