If you have ever hosted a project on RubyForge, SourceForge or some other clone such as GForge, you have probably experienced the pain of making a release on these systems.

This is because these systems only offer an ugly form based interface for releases. No web services, no scp. Just these bloody forms. -And most people interact with them manually, uploading files, pasting in release notes and so forth. There are probably some odd, unknown, project-specific scripts lying around in random places that can automate this, but I haven't seen anything reusable.

In fact, I hadn't seen anything at all, so 4 months ago I wrote my own script to do this. Except I couldn't get the HTTP multipart posts (attachments) to work properly. So I left it fermenting for a while...

But two days ago I felt the pain again, and I came across DHH's Rake script which does something very similar. -And it had the multipart code I couldn't grok myself.

So I decided to take the best parts of my old attempt and DHH's code from Rails' Rake script and make a proper library, so that others can use it. -Not only on RubyForge, but hopefully also on SourceForge and other sites running SourceForge clones.

So if you're as lazy as me, check out XForge.

XForge is released using XForge (of course!), so it works fine on RubyForge. Please let me know if you get it to work anywhere else, or if you have bugs or improvements.