Equivalent to pattern rules?

[mohamed--abdel-maksoud]

I tried to find this in the documentation to no avail. What is Task's equivalent to pattern rules? e.g.

%.dat : books/%.txt countwords.py
	python countwords.py $< $*.dat

[andreynering]

Hi @mohamed--abdel-maksoud,

This is still missing in Task. One of the oldest issues at the repository contains a proposal to address something similar:

#82 (comment)

Let me know if you have thoughts about the proposal.

[mohamed--abdel-maksoud]

Hi @andreynering
Thanks for the answer (and for the amazing tool that is Task!)
My 2c: the foreach syntax is quite elegant, the only issue I see is that it doesn't expose its targets (i.e. what it generates). If it supports the special wildcard % like Make does, it'd solve the issue. E.g.

create_pdf:
  sources: print/%.ps    # e.g. print/magazine.ps
  generates: print/%.pdf
  foreach: true
  cmds:
    ps2pdf "{{.SOURCE}}"
publish:
  deps: ["print/magazine.pdf"]
  cmds:
    sftp put print/magazine.pdf <some server>

[andreynering]

Yes, the idea would be to have a special variable that would contain the path for interpolation, like .SOURCE in your example.

[mohamed--abdel-maksoud]

I understood .SOURCE as "the name of the current item from sources in a foreach iteration". How do we specify "all the files the foreach will generate"?

[jirib]

I would love to see such feature, would help me to build static website via pandoc from markdown to html files ;)

[mohamed--abdel-maksoud]

OK, I add it to my TODO then :)